Question

Any ideas or thoughts about the best way to get auto and manual tracking to work together?

Answer 1

I think the most straightforward approach (which may or may not end up being the best) might be something like this:

1. The auto-tracker gets run, and finds a bunch of unassigned animal tracks. These get stored in Project object.
2. User selects a chick (e.g. "Chick #1") to do manual tracking
3. User clicks center point, and that point gets added the AnimalTrack object for "Chick #1", and also the video auto-advances (e.g. 1 sec forward)
4. User keeps clicking center point of that chick, until
5. The software notices that the user just clicked very close (in both time and position) to a TimePoint that was stored in one of those unassigned tracks (that came from the auto-tracker). When this happens, the WHOLE unassigned track gets added into the "Chick #1" track, and the video fast-forwards to the end of that track, where the user can keep manual tracking again.
   1. b. Perhaps, instead of automatically adding the whole track, the user should be offered the choice? Or nearby unassigned paths should be displayed to the user visually? Or at least the nearest unassigned TimePoint should be shown, so the user knows they have the option to click on it. Not sure...

However, I would also love to hear other people's ideas. They may have better approaches!

Answer 2

In my group, they let the auto tracking do it job. Then, when the auto tracking have a problems the manual tracking, which is the user will click the mouse to create dots and save the data for chicks. Users can use the chick that they want to track and add if they think that is not right.

Comments

What if the missed segment is very very long, if the chicks get into a blob for a long time the user is going to have to make a very substantial amount of clicks in order to add points for each and every chick.

I would say there must be an effective way to develop a method so that if the coordinates of the un-tracked segment are "close" to the tracked segments the software would know.