Multi-object tracking of human spermatozoa

Lauge Sørensen; Jakob Østergaard; Peter Johansen; Marleen de Bruijne

doi:10.1117/12.771135

11 March 2008 Multi-object tracking of human spermatozoa

Lauge Sørensen, Jakob Østergaard, Peter Johansen, Marleen de Bruijne

Proceedings Volume 6914, Medical Imaging 2008: Image Processing; 69142C (2008) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.771135
Event: Medical Imaging, 2008, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

We propose a system for tracking of human spermatozoa in phase-contrast microscopy image sequences. One of the main aims of a computer-aided sperm analysis (CASA) system is to automatically assess sperm quality based on spermatozoa motility variables. In our case, the problem of assessing sperm quality is cast as a multi-object tracking problem, where the objects being tracked are the spermatozoa. The system combines a particle filter and Kalman filters for robust motion estimation of the spermatozoa tracks. Further, the combinatorial aspect of assigning observations to labels in the particle filter is formulated as a linear assignment problem solved using the Hungarian algorithm on a rectangular cost matrix, making the algorithm capable of handling missing or spurious observations. The costs are calculated using hidden Markov models that express the plausibility of an observation being the next position in the track history of the particle labels. Observations are extracted using a scale-space blob detector utilizing the fact that the spermatozoa appear as bright blobs in a phase-contrast microscope. The output of the system is the complete motion track of each of the spermatozoa. Based on these tracks, different CASA motility variables can be computed, for example curvilinear velocity or straight-line velocity. The performance of the system is tested on three different phase-contrast image sequences of varying complexity, both by visual inspection of the estimated spermatozoa tracks and by measuring the mean squared error (MSE) between the estimated spermatozoa tracks and manually annotated tracks, showing good agreement.

Citation Download Citation

Lauge Sørensen, Jakob Østergaard, Peter Johansen, and Marleen de Bruijne "Multi-object tracking of human spermatozoa", Proc. SPIE 6914, Medical Imaging 2008: Image Processing, 69142C (11 March 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.771135

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