Local affine texture tracking for serial registration of zebrafish images

Abstract

The aim of this work is to register serial in-vivo confocal microscopy images of zebrafish to enable accurate cell tracking on corresponding fluorescence images. The following problem arises during acquisition; the zebrafish tail may undergo a series of movement and non-linear deformations, which if not corrected, adds to the motion of leukocytes being tracked. This makes it difficult to accurately assess their motion. We developed a correlation based, local affine image matching method, which is well suited to the textured DIC images of the anatomy of the zebrafish and enables accurate and efficient tracking of image regions over successive frames. Experimental results of the serial registration and tracking demonstrate its accuracy in estimating local affine motions in zebrafish sequences.