In this paper, we propose a hybrid multi-cell tracking approach to accurately and jointly estimate the state and its contour of each cell. Our approach consists of level set evolution and ant colony optimization, representing, respectively, the deterministic and stochastic methods for cell tracking. Firstly, birth ants are directly distributed into the regions depicted by raw curves achieved by the traditional level set evolution. Then, the ants move towards potential regions based on the pheromone deposited by ants and the gradient information of current image. Finally, the resulting pheromone field is embedded in the variational level set to drive the evolution of cell curve to yield an accurate one and correspond cell position estimate. The experiment results show that our method could automatically track multi-cell and achieve an accurate contour estimation of each cell.
['Dongmei Jiang', 'Benlian Xu', 'Long Ge']
A Hybrid Multi-Cell Tracking Approach with Level Set Evolution and Ant Colony Optimization