Boids live visualization (or for generating tracking datasets)

[VolkerH]

Hi Robert,

in case you get bored over the holidays I want to mention an idea that I recently communicated to @jni, but I won't find the time and the peace of mind to implement myself for a while.

Implementing the Boids flocking algorithm with live visualization in napari. Idea would be to simulate a few boids. Each boid would have a few basic parameters such as a diameter and intensity, according to which a few sub coordinates are generated (from a probability distribution function taking into account diameter and intensity), these sub coordinates would represent individual fluorophores.
The resulting point coordinates could then be convolved with a PSF (simulated or measured from a real microscope).

While being a nice visualization on one hand it would also allow generating some interesting tracking datasets with groundtruth.

Just mentioning it ... no pressure ;-)

[haesleinhuepf]

Great idea @VolkerH ! I just add a link here for now, because I think this implementation could be a good starting point:
https://github.com/meznak/boids_py

[VolkerH]

Apparently @leoguignard has implemented this recently:

https://github.com/leoguignard/napari-boids