We present LodeSTAR, an unsupervised, single-shot object detector for microscopy. LodeSTAR exploits the symmetries of problem statements to train neural networks using extremely small datasets and without ground truth. We demonstrate that LodeSTAR is comparable to state-of-the-art, supervised deep learning methods, despite training on orders of magnitude less training data, and no annotations. Moreover, we demonstrate that LodeSTAR achieves near theoretically optimal results in terms of sub-pixel positioning of objects of various shapes. Finally, we show that LodeSTAR can exploit additional symmetries to measure additional particle properties, such as the axial position of objects and particle polarizability.
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