Description and retrieval of 3D cellular structures

Recent advances in management of multimedia digital libraries enable effective retrieval of information in the form of audio, image and video. Many archives of 3D objects already exist and are expected to grow both in relevance and size. However retrieval of information in the form of 3D objects has received limited attention so far In this paper we address the problem of effective description and retrieval of 3D data representing intracellular structures. These structures are represented as image stacks, where an image stack is constituted by a set of 2D images representing sections of a cellular body at different heights. In the proposed approach 2D visual feature descriptors and Hidden Markov Models are combined to obtain a representation model which is able to distinguish such intracellular structures as Golgi, nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum and lysosomes. Preliminary results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed representation model.