Multiple Hypothesis Tracking for Cluttered Biological Image Sequences
Résumé
In this paper, we present a method for simultaneously tracking thousands of targets in biological image sequences, which
is of major importance in modern biology. The complexity and inherent randomness of the problem lead us to propose a unified
probabilistic framework for tracking biological particles in microscope images. The framework includes realistic models of particle
motion and existence, and of fluorescence image features. For the track extraction process per se, the very cluttered conditions
motivate the adoption of a multiframe approach which enforces tracking decision robustness to poor imaging conditions and to random
target movements. We tackle the large-scale nature of the problem by adapting the Multiple Hypothesis Tracking algorithm to the
proposed framework, resulting in a method with a favorable trade-off between the model complexity and the computational cost of the
tracking procedure. When compared to the state-of-the-art tracking techniques for bioimaging, the proposed algorithm is shown to be
the only method providing high quality results despite the critically poor imaging conditions and the dense target presence. We thus
demonstrate the benefits of advanced Bayesian tracking techniques for the accurate computational modeling of dynamical biological
processes, which is promising for further developments in this domain.