# Welcome to Flowtracks’s documentation!¶

Flowtracks is a Python package for manipulating a trajectory database obtained from 3D Particle Tracking Velocimetry (3D-PTV) analysis. It understands the most common output formats for 3D-PTV trajectories used in the 3D-PTV community, and adds its own HDF5-based format, which allows faster and more flexible access to the trajectory database.

Contents:

# Getting Started¶

## Obtaining the package and its dependencies¶

The most recent version of this package may be found under the auspices of the OpenPTV project, in its Github repository,

Dependencies:

## Installation¶

To install this package, follow the standard procedure for installing Python modules. Using a terminal, change directory into the root directory of theis program’s source code, then run

python setup.py install


Note that you may need administrative privileges on the machine you are using.

The install script will install the Python package in the default place for your platform. Additionally, it will install example scripts in a subdirectory flowtracks-examples/ under the default executable location, and a the documentation in the default package root. For information on where these directories are on your platform (and how to change them), refer to the Python documentation. Other standard features of the setup script are also described therein.

## Documentation¶

This documentation is available in the source directory under the docs/ subdirectory. It is maintained as a Sphinx project, so that you can build the documentation in one of several output formats, including HTML and PDF. To build, install Sphinx, then use

or replace html with any other builder supported by Sphinx.

Alternatively, the documentation is pre-built and available online on ReadTheDocs.

## Examples¶

The examples/ subdirectory in the source distribution contains two IPython notebooks, both available as HTML for direct viewing:

## Analysis Script¶

The script analyse_fhdf.py is installed by default. for instruction on its usage, run:

analyse_fhdf.py --help


As the help message printed informs, there are two mandatory command-line arguments. One is the data file for processing, the other is a config file with some rudimentary metadata. Examples for both are supplied in the data/ subdirectory of this package. A config file accepted by the script looks something like this:

[Particle]
density = 1450
diameter = 500e-6

[Scene]
particles file = particles.h5
tracers file = tracers.h5
first frame = 10001
last frame = 10200
frame rate = 500


the file above may be used for producing an analysis from the files in the data/ subdirectory, when it is the current directory. this has been done in both IPython examples mentioned above, where the usage is shown.

# General Facilities¶

## Data structures¶

the most basic building blocks of any analysis are sets of particles representing a slice of the database. These are represented by a ParticleSet instance. ParticleSet is a flexible class. It holds a number of numpy arrays whose first dimension must have the same length; each is a column in a table of particle properties, whose each row represents one particle’s data. It must contain particles’ position and velocity data, but users may add more properties as relevant to their database. For details, ssee the ParticleSet documentation.

The two most common ways to slice a database are by frame (time point) and by trajectory (data fore the same particle over several frames). For this there are two classes provided by flowtracks, both derived from ParticleSet and thus behave in a similar way. They both expect the time and trajid (trajtectory ID) properties to exist for the particle data, but each class treats these properties differently.

ParticleSnapshot is a ParticleSet which assumes that all particles have the same time, so that this property is scalar. Similarly, the Trajectory class expects a same trajid across its data. A trajectory ID is simply an integer number unique to each trajectory. Users may select their numbering scheme when creating Trajectory objects from scratch, but in most cases the data is read from a file, in which case Flowtracks’ input rutines handle the numbering automatically.

Refer to Modules Containing Flowtracks Basic Data Structures for the details of all these classes.

## Input and Output¶

The module flowtracks.io provides several functions for reading and writing particle data. The currently-supported formats are:

• ptv_is - the format output by OpenPTV code as well as the older but still widely used 3DPTV. Composed of one file per frame, containing a particle’s number, its number in the previous and next frame file, and current position.
• xuap - a similar format using one file per frame with columns for position, velocity, and acceleration for both the particle and the surrounding fluid. This file format represents an initial analysis of ptv_is raw data.
• acc - another frame-files format with each particle having, additionally to data provided in the xuap format, the time step relative to the trajectory start.
• mat - a Matlab file containing a list of trajectory structure-arrays with xuap-like data for each trajectory.
• hdf - Flowtracks’ own optimised format, relying on the HDF5 file format and the PyTables package for fast handling thereof. It is highly recommended to use the other reading/writing functions in order to convert data in other formats to this format. This allows users a more flexible programmatic interface as well as the speed of PyTables.

Description of the relevant functions, as well as some other IO convenience facilities may be found in the module’s reference documentation.

## Basic Analysis and display¶

The package provides some facilities for analysing the database and extracting kinematic or dynamic information embedded in it. Dynamic analysis requires the particle size and diameter to be known (Flowtracks assumes a spherical particle for these analyses, but users may extend this behaviour). These properties may be stored in the Particle class provided by the package. flowtracks.io provides a way to read them from an INI file.

The flowtracks.interpolation module provides an object-oriented approach to interpolating the data. It offers some built-in interpolation methods, and is hoped to be extensible to other methods without much effort.

Some plotting support is provided by flowtracks.graphics. Functions therein allow users to generate probability distributions from data and to plot them using Matplotlib, and a function is provided that plots 3D vector data as 3 subplots of components.

Other facilities (smoothing, nearest-neighbour searches) are described in the respective module’s documentation.

# HDF5-based fast databases¶

Above the layer of basic data structures, Flowtracks provides a generalized view of a scene, containing several trajectories across a number of frames. This view is iterable in several ways and provides general metadata access.

The Scene class is the most basic form of this view. It is tied to one HDF5 file exactly, which holds the database. This file may be iterated by trajectory, by frame, or by segments, a concept introduced by Flowtracks for easier time-derived analyses requiring the next time-point to be also known.

A segment, in the context of iterating a Scene is a tuple containing two ParticleSnapshot() objects, one for the current frame and one for the next. The next frame data is filtered to contain only particles that also appear in the current frame, unlike when iterating simply by frames.

The DualScene class extends this by tying itself into two HDF5 files, each representing a separate class of particles which coexist in the same experiment. This has been useful for measuring tracers and inertial particles simultaneously, but other users are of course possible. Iterating by frames is supported here, providing a Frame object on each iteration. Iterating by trajectories is ambiguous and not supported currently. Segments iteration, similarly to the frames iteration, returns two Frame objects.

The flowtracks.analysis module provides a function for applying analyser classes sequentially to segments iterated over, and generetes a properly sized HDF5 file in the format of the input file.

AnalysedScene objects track simultaneously the DualScene and an analysis file resulting from it. They contain the collect() facility. It allows finding of all (or selected) data belonging to a certain property, regardless of which of the files it is stored in.

# Manipulating text formats directly¶

Similarly to the DualScene class used with the HDF5 format, the Sequence class tracks two sets of particles and allows iterating by frame. Since this class relies on Trajectory lists as its underlying database, it does not provide a special facility for iterating over trajectories.

Though Sequence also accepts trajectory iterators, and flowtracks.io provides you with iterators if asked, the working memory used in actuality may still be large and the access times are much slower than the equivalent times achieved by the specialized HDF5 classes.

Corresponding to the flowtracks.analysis module, Sequence provides the map_trajectories() method for applying callback functions on an entire scene, frame by frame.