STracking: a free and open-source python library for particle tracking and analysis

Summary Analysis of intra and extra cellular dynamic like vesicles transport involves particle tracking algorithms. Designing a particle tracking pipeline is a routine but tedious task. Therefore, particle dynamics analysis is often performed by combining several pieces of software (filtering, detection, tracking…) requiring a lot of manual operations, and therefore leading to poorly reproducible results. A good synergy between particle detector with a tracker is of paramount importance. In addition, a user-friendly interface to control the quality of estimated trajectories is necessary. To address these issues, we developed STracking a python library that allows to combine algorithms into standardized particle tracking pipelines. Availability and Implementation STracking is available as a python library using “pip install” and the source code is publicly available on GitHub ( https://github.com/sylvainprigent/stracking ). A graphical interface is available using two napari plugins: napari-stracking and napari-tracks-reader . These napari plugins can be installed via the napari plugins menu or using “pip install”. The napari plugin source codes are available on GitHub ( https://github.com/sylvainprigent/napari-tracks-reader , https://github.com/sylvainprigent/napari-stracking ). Contact [email protected] , [email protected]