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Kinetrace is a desktop app for tracking animal movement in video: click the body parts you care about, watch them being followed live, pause at any moment to correct a point with the mouse, and export the tracks. Built for long (40,000+ frame), high-resolution (4K) recordings.

• Point tracking with AllTracker (the default) or Meta's CoTracker3, plus a native-resolution sub-pixel refinement stage; for a target small enough to be one point (a dot over water or sky), the model-free Moving spot point model and a test that picks the point model from your own clicks (Small, fast targets).
• Silhouettes with Meta's SAM 3 / SAM 2: tail tip, midline points, feet and wing tips come from the outline, so thin tails and textureless bodies no longer defeat tracking. Each animal is a layer with its own points, skeleton and (optional) silhouette, so several animals can be tracked in one video.
• Several cameras and 3D: sync by sound or motion, wand and checkerboard calibration, triangulation, world axes of your own choosing, visual-hull volume, speeds and accelerations.
• Human bodies: joints and joint angles with SAM 3D Body or ViTPose.
• Exports for DeepLabCut (single and multi-animal), SLEAP, DLTdv8, MATLAB and plain CSV.
• Written for users with no tracking or calibration background: every control explains itself, and every number comes with a plain-language verdict.

Quick start. Get the code (Code → Download ZIP, or git clone), then double-click run.bat on Windows (afterwards the Kinetrace shortcut it makes), Kinetrace.command on an Apple Silicon Mac (macOS 14+), or run ./run.sh on Ubuntu 22.04+. Nothing needs to be installed first — not even Python: the first run sets up everything inside the folder without asking anything, and ends with a system check saying what your computer can run — details in Install & run. New to tracking? The first start offers a one-minute tour of the window on a demo video (again any time: Help → Take the Interface Tour); then the user manual.

Any computer: an NVIDIA GPU is used when present; without one (or on a Mac, with its Metal GPU) everything still works, only slower, and the one NVIDIA-only feature (SAM 3D Body) is greyed out with the reason. Everything stays in the folder: nothing is installed into the operating system, deleting the folder uninstalls Kinetrace (your projects and exports stay where you saved them; Help → Kinetrace's Folders… lists every place it uses), and it sends no usage data anywhere.

Licences. Kinetrace is free for any non-commercial use — research, teaching, study — under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 (developed at biomechLab@CMC). CoTracker3 is non-commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0); AllTracker is MIT; SAM 3 / SAM 3D Body are under Meta's SAM License (acknowledge them in publications). Every model and package is listed in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.

• Install & run
• Workflow: track an animal
• Segments, silhouettes & skeletons
• Several cameras & 3D
• Human bodies
• Export formats
• Working with other programs
• Projects & autosave
• Keyboard & mouse
• Accuracy
• Performance (4K)
• Limitations
• Testing
• Folder map & design

Also

• User manual — for beginners, also in the app (F1)
• Licences of everything used

_{Source code, issues and releases: the repository.}