Particle detection and tracking by a-contrario approach: application to fluorescence time-lapse imaging

In this work, we propose a probabilistic approach for the detection and the tracking of particles on biological images. In presence of very noised and poor quality data, particles and trajectories can be characterized by an a-contrario model, that estimates the probability of observing the structures of interest in random data. This approach, first introduced in the modeling of human visual perception and then successfully applied in many image processing tasks, leads to algorithms that do not require a previous learning stage, nor a tedious parameter tuning and are very robust to noise. Comparative evaluations against a well established baseline show that the proposed approach outperforms the state of the art.