Tracking fluorescent spots in wide-field microscopy images

The in vivo imaging of proteins represents a promising technique for understanding the processes taking place at cellular level. Tracking the single proteins manually is tedious and the results are difficult to replicate. Due to the imaging characteristics the automation of the task is difficult. In this paper we study the problem of denoising of the image sequences, spot detection and data association. The 3D version of three denoising algorithms were implemented: adaptive mean filtering, anisotropic diffusion and spatial-tonal convolution. Their effect combined with the spot detection based on the a trous wavelet transform is studied. Finally, a point tracking algorithm is applied having as input the spots detected in the previous step. The algorithm can handle new track creation, track termination as well as one frame occlusions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results and further work.