I don't have much experience with this but as far as centroid tracking goes, I would guess that it can probably be done pretty easily since there is a lot of coherency from image to image, so you can with a fair amount of confidence start at the centroid of the previous frame then expand out in all directions.
You may be able to use this algorithm:
Phase Correlation
it involves taking the FFT of the image then doing some fancy stuff with it. basically if you run it from frame to frame it will exploit the coherency to very quickly tell you how the centroid has shifted