Cell Tracking in C. elegans with Cell Position Heatmap-Based Alignment
  and Pairwise Detection
Kaito Shiku Hiromitsu Shirai Takeshi Ishihara Ryoma Bise
3D cell tracking in a living organism has a crucial role in live cell image
analysis. Cell tracking in C. elegans has two difficulties. First, cell
migration in a consecutive frame is large since they move their head during
scanning. Second, cell detection is often inconsistent in consecutive frames
due to touching cells and low-contrast images, and these inconsistent
detections affect the tracking performance worse. In this paper, we propose a
cell tracking method to address these issues, which has two main contributions.
First, we introduce cell position heatmap-based non-rigid alignment with
test-time fine-tuning, which can warp the detected points to near the positions
at the next frame. Second, we propose a pairwise detection method, which uses
the information of detection results at the previous frame for detecting cells
at the current frame. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of
each module, and the proposed method achieved the best performance in
comparison.