Ctrax is an opensource machine vision program for estimating the positions and orientations of many walking flies; maintaining their individual identities over long periods of time. Ctrax was designed to allow high-throughput, quantitative analysis of behavior in freely moving flies. Basically, the primary goal of the publishers in this project is to provide quantitative behavior analysis tools to the neuroethology community, thereby endeavoring to make the system adaptable to other lab’s setups. The publishers of Ctrax have assessed the quality of the tracking results for their setup, and found that it can maintain fly identities indefinitely with minimal supervision and on average for 1.5 fly-hours automatically.

Ctrax has been installed and tested on 32-bit Windows and 32- and 64-bit Linux systems. As it is written in Python and Python is a platform-independent language, it conceivably can be run on other platforms as well. You can view or go straight to the homepage to find out more about installation instructions. However, you must ensure your system has enough memory to store the ellipse required for each fly in each frame. The faster your system, the faster and more effective Ctrax is going to be.

Ctrax is an open source and requires Windows 7, 2000, XP 2003, as well as Vista operating systems.

Want to check it out? Visit Ctrax.

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