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An evolutionary spline fitting algorithm for identifying filamentous cyanobacteria

Published: 18 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Bright field cellular microscopy is a simple and non-invasive method for capturing cytological images. However, the resulting micrographs prove challenging for image segmentation, especially with samples that have tightly clustered or overlapping cells. Filamentous cyanobacteria grow as linearly arranged cells forming chain-like filaments that often touch and overlap. Existing bright field cell segmentation methods perform poorly with these bacteria, and are incapable of identifying the filaments. Existing filament tracking methods are rudimentary, and cannot reliably account for overlapping or parallel touching filaments. We propose a new approach for identifying filaments in bright field micrographs by combining information about both filaments and cells. This information is used by an evolutionary strategy to iteratively construct a continuous spline representation that tracks the medial line of the filaments. We demonstrate that overlapping and parallel touching filaments are segmented correctly in many difficult cases.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '13: Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
March 2013
2124 pages
ISBN:9781450316569
DOI:10.1145/2480362
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 18 March 2013

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Author Tags

  1. bright field microscopy
  2. evolutionary strategy
  3. filament segmentation
  4. filamentous cyanobacteria

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SAC '13
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SAC '13: SAC '13
March 18 - 22, 2013
Coimbra, Portugal

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SAC '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 255 of 1,063 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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