CRF formulation of active contour population for efficient three-dimensional neurite tracing

We present a conditional random field for three-dimensional neurite tracing, using a population of open curve active contours. We aim at increased robustness under spatially varying neurite-background contrast, and at the same time reducing the computational complexity compared to the state-of-the-art. While most existing active contour based methods perform tracing by evolving multiple snakes along the neurite centerline in a sequential manner, our approach implements a simultaneous evolution, reducing the complexity as we show theoretically in our algorithm analysis and experimentally. Our approach provides increased accuracy in ambiguous regions (e.g., low contrast, neurite bifurcations and crossovers, etc.), by exploiting interactions among spatially neighboring snakes. We illustrate the performance of our method and compare it with existing frameworks using sample volumes of wild-type sensory neurons in the larval Drosophila.