  We present the LOcal Track Finder (LOTF) algorithm, a method that performs
charged-particle trajectory reconstruction using the Straw Tube Tracker, one of
the central trackers of the antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt (PANDA)
detector. The algorithm builds upon the neighboring relations of the tubes to
connect individual hits and form track candidates. In addition, it uses a local
fitting procedure to handle regions where several tracks overlap and utilizes a
system of virtual nodes to reconstruct the z-information of the particle
trajectories. We generated 30,000 events to assess the performance of our
approach and compared our results to two other track reconstruction methods.
LOTF has (1) an average of 85\% of found tracks, (2) the largest number of
Fully Pure tracks, (3) the lowest amount of incorrect reconstructions, and (4)
is significantly faster than the other two approaches. Further, we compared the
z-reconstruction performance with one of the two alternative methods and show
that LOTF improves the median z-error by a factor of 8.7. Finally, we tested
our method using 3,750 data sets composed of 4 events each, showing that our
approach handles cases in which events are mixed. The raw (without
parallelization) average reconstruction rate is about 68,000 hits/s, which
makes the present algorithm promising for online data selection and processing.
