  Bipolar Magnetic Regions (BMRs) provide crucial information about solar
magnetism. They exhibit varying morphology and magnetic properties throughout
their lifetime, and studying these properties can provide valuable insights
into the workings of the solar dynamo. The majority of previous studies have
counted every detected BMR as a new one and have not been able to study the
full life history of each BMRs. To address this issue, we have developed an
Automatic Tracking Algorithm (AutoTAB) for BMRs, that tracks the BMRs for their
entire lifetime or throughout their disk passage. AutoTAB uses the binary maps
of detected BMRs to automatically track the regions. This is done by
differentially rotating the binary maps of the detected regions and checking
for overlaps between them. In this first article of this project, we provide a
detailed description of the working of the algorithm and evaluate its strengths
and weaknesses by comparing it with existing algorithms. AutoTAB excels in
tracking even for the small BMRs (with flux $\sim 10^{20}$ Mx) and it has
successfully tracked 9152 BMRs over the last two solar cycles (1996--2020),
providing a comprehensive dataset that depicts the evolution of various
properties for each BMR. The tracked BMRs exhibit the well-known
latitudinal-time distribution and 11 year cyclic variation except for small
BMRs which appear at all phases of the solar cycle and show weak latitudinal
dependency. Finally, we discuss the possibility of adapting our algorithm to
other datasets and expanding the technique to track other solar features in the
future.
