A Discrete Chain Graph Model for 3d+t Cell Tracking with High Misdetection Robustness

Bernhard X. Kausler, Martin Schiegg, Björn Andres, Martin S. Lindner, Ullrich Köthe, Heike Leitte, Jochen Wittbrodt, Lars Hufnagel, Fred A. Hamprecht

Abstract: Tracking by assignment is well suited for tracking a varying number of divisible cells, but suffers from false positive detections. We reformulate tracking by assignment as a chain graph–a mixed directed-undirected probabilistic graphical model–and obtain a tracking simultaneously over all time steps from the maximum a-posteriori configuration. The model is evaluated on two challenging four-dimensional data sets from developmental biology. Compared to previous work, we obtain improved tracks due to an increased robustness against false positive detections and the incorporation of temporal domain knowledge.