  Examining locomotion has improved our basic understanding of motor control
and aided in treating motor impairment. Mice and rats are premier models of
human disease and increasingly the model systems of choice for basic
neuroscience. High frame rates (250 Hz) are needed to quantify the kinematics
of these running rodents. Manual tracking, especially for multiple markers,
becomes time-consuming and impossible for large sample sizes. Therefore, the
need for automatic segmentation of these markers has grown in recent years. We
propose two methods to segment and track these markers: first, using SLIC
superpixels segmentation with a tracker based on position, speed, shape, and
color information of the segmented region in the previous frame; second, using
a thresholding on hue channel following up with the same tracker. The
comparison showed that the SLIC superpixels method was superior because the
segmentation was more reliable and based on both color and spatial information.
