Active contours applied to the shape and motion analysis of amoeba

Christophe Zimmer; Vannary Meas-Yedid; Estelle Glory; Elisabeth Labruyere; Nancy Guillen; Jean-Christophe Olivo-Marin

doi:10.1117/12.447275

2 November 2001 Active contours applied to the shape and motion analysis of amoeba

Christophe Zimmer, Vannary Meas-Yedid, Estelle Glory, Elisabeth Labruyere, Nancy Guillen, Jean-Christophe Olivo-Marin

Proceedings Volume 4476, Vision Geometry X; (2001) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.447275
Event: International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology, 2001, San Diego, CA, United States

Abstract

We present a method based on active contours to track and segment biological cells in large image sequences obtained by video-microscopy. This task is facilitated by good time resolution and global contrast, but important obstacles are the low contrast boundary deformations known as pseudopods, as well as cell aggregations and divisions. In order to allow better detection of local boundary deformations, we adopted the gradient vector flow (GVF) model of Xu and Prince, which is defined as the steady-state solution of a reaction-diffusion problem. We discuss an undesirable effect of boundary competition in the GVF that can lead to incorrect segmentations for grey-level images. We propose to replace the steady-state solution by a transient solution of the diffusion equation to alleviate this effect, which also allows significant gains in computation time. To enhance pseudopods over texture features, we use a binary edge map obtained from a Canny-Deriche filter followed by hysteresis thresholding. We use topological operators to efficiently detect intersections and maintain contour separation between aggregating cells. Cell divisions are automatically handled by this method. We discuss limits and possible improvements of this work.

Citation Download Citation

Christophe Zimmer, Vannary Meas-Yedid, Estelle Glory, Elisabeth Labruyere, Nancy Guillen, and Jean-Christophe Olivo-Marin "Active contours applied to the shape and motion analysis of amoeba", Proc. SPIE 4476, Vision Geometry X, (2 November 2001); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.447275

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