• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.32-40
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• 2011

The tracking and analysis of cell activities in time-lapse sequences plays an important role in understanding complex biological processes such as the spread of the tumor, an invasion of the virus, the wound recovery and the cell division. For automatic tracking of cells, the tasks such as the cell detection at each frame, the investigation of the correspondence between cells in previous and current frames, the identification of the cell division and the recognition of new cells must be performed. This paper proposes an automatic cell tracking algorithm. In the first frame, the marker of each cell is extracted using the feature vector obtained by the analysis of cellular regions, and then the watershed algorithm is applied using the extracted markers to produce the cell segmentation. In subsequent frames, the segmentation results of the previous frame are incorporated in the segmentation process for the current frame. A combined criterion of geometric and intensity property of each cell region is used for the proper association between previous and current cells to obtain correct cell tracking. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves the tracking performance compared to the tracking method in Cellprofiler (the software package for automatic analysis of bioimages).