Kinetrace

Track how animals move — in any video, on any computer, with no coding. Click the body parts you care about, watch them followed live, fix any mistake with the mouse, and export the tracks to the tools you already use.

What it does

• Follows what you point at. Click a snout, a toe, a marker on a wand; it is tracked frame by frame while you watch, and you can stop at any moment (X) to click a point back where it belongs.
• Copes with hard footage. Long recordings (40,000+ frames), 4K, 300+ fps, small and fast animals, thin tails and textureless bodies — the animal's outline supplies tail tip, midline and feet where points alone would slip; a target small enough to be one point — a dot over waves or sky — has a point model of its own, and a test on your clicks says which one to use.
• Goes from cameras to 3D. Line several cameras up by sound or motion, calibrate them with a wand and a checkerboard, and get 3D positions, speeds, accelerations and body volume.
• Measures people too. Joints and joint angles from ordinary video.
• Explains itself. Written for people who have never tracked anything: every number comes with a plain-language verdict and a way to check it by hand.

Get started

1. Download — Code → Download ZIP and unzip it (the folder is called Kinetrace-main; rename it if you like), or git clone https://github.com/prnvkhndlwl/Kinetrace.git (the folder is called Kinetrace). Put it in your own folder, not one synced to iCloud / OneDrive / Dropbox (on a Mac: your home folder, not an iCloud-synced Desktop or Documents).

2. Start it:

   Windows	Mac (Apple Silicon, macOS 14+)	Ubuntu 22.04+
   double-click run.bat; afterwards the Kinetrace shortcut it makes in the folder (no console window; pin it to Start or the taskbar)	double-click Kinetrace.command; the first time, macOS refuses it: click Done (not Move to Trash, the default), then allow it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway	./run.sh

3. Wait once. The first start sets everything up inside the folder without asking anything (about 4 GB with an NVIDIA GPU, mostly PyTorch; about 1.5 GB on a Mac; a few minutes), and ends with a system check of what your computer can run. After that it starts in seconds — on a Mac with Kinetrace.app, which the first start makes in the folder (no Terminal needed). The first Track and the first outline each download one model (66 MB / 617 MB, with a progress window); from then on it works offline.

The full steps, for every system and for someone who has never used a Terminal, are in docs/INSTALL.md (also in the folder you download): where to put the folder, what each message means, which model runs on which computer, uninstalling.

Optional: the best outlines (SAM 3, 3.4 GB) need Meta's permission on Hugging Face first, then a token pasted in Settings — the steps. 3D human joints (SAM 3D Body) need that too and an NVIDIA graphics card: Mac users skip it (2D joints with ViTPose work everywhere). Everything else downloads by itself.

On a Mac (measured on an M4 Max): AllTracker (the default point model; it failed in 0.4.1), CoTracker3, SAM 2.1 and ViTPose run on the Mac's GPU — AllTracker with the same coordinates as on the CPU, 0.74 px on 4K; ball markers 3.3× faster than on its CPU. SAM 3D Body cannot run. Where the manual says Ctrl, press ⌘. All models, every system.

New to tracking? The user manual (also F1 in the app) walks you through your first session.

Works with

DeepLabCut · SLEAP · DLTdv8 · Anipose · easyWand / Argus · MATLAB · Blender · plain CSV — tracks, calibrations and 3D points in and out (details).

How accurate?

More in Accuracy and Performance.

Is it for me?

• Yes if you film animals (any species — lizards, gliders, birds, fish, mammals) or people and want positions, angles or 3D out of the video.
• No GPU needed: an NVIDIA card or a Mac's own GPU makes it faster; without one everything still works, only slower.
• Several animals in one video, each with its own points, skeleton and (optional) silhouette; identities come from your clicks (no automatic re-identification yet).
• Non-commercial use only (research, teaching, study) — see below.

Learn more

Install & run · Your first tracking · Small, fast targets · Silhouettes & skeletons · Cameras & 3D · Human bodies · Export formats · Projects & autosave · Keyboard & mouse · Limitations · The whole wiki

Updating: Help → Check for Updates… installs a newer version and keeps your projects and models; after 30 days without a check, a note at start reminds you.

Found a bug or have a question? Open an issue — contributing says what helps, and the code of conduct applies. Security problems: report them privately (SECURITY.md).

Acknowledgements

Much of Kinetrace grew out of years spent tracking with DLTdv and DeepLabCut: they shaped what it does and how it does it — clicking and correcting points frame by frame, calibrated multi-camera 3D, and following user-defined body parts through long videos. Kinetrace is an independent program and contains no code from either; it reads and writes both formats so that work can move freely between them. The two papers:

• Hedrick, T. L. (2008). Software techniques for two- and three-dimensional kinematic measurements of biological and biomimetic systems. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 3(3), 034001. doi:10.1088/1748-3182/3/3/034001
• Mathis, A., Mamidanna, P., Cury, K. M., Abe, T., Murthy, V. N., Mathis, M. W., & Bethge, M. (2018). DeepLabCut: markerless pose estimation of user-defined body parts with deep learning. Nature Neuroscience, 21(9), 1281–1289. doi:10.1038/s41593-018-0209-y

Licence & privacy

Free for any non-commercial use under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 — developed at biomechLab@CMC. Built on AllTracker, CoTracker3 (non-commercial), SAM, ViTPose and SAM 3D Body; each keeps its own licence (all of them).

Nothing leaves your computer. Kinetrace sends no usage data; it goes online only to download a model the first time it is needed and when you ask it to check for updates. Everything Kinetrace installs lives in its folder (the environment, the models, logs, settings); your projects and exports are saved where you choose and are never deleted with it. Help → Kinetrace's Folders… lists every place it uses, and uninstalling is deleting the folder (bash uninstall.sh on a Mac or Ubuntu also offers to remove the few traces it can leave outside).