Evaluation of approaches for tracking virus particles in fluorescence microscopy images

Abstract

Tracking virus particles in fluorescence microscopy image sequences enables the characterization of the dynamical behavior of these objects. Several approaches have been developed for the task of virus tracking. However, few studies have quantitatively evaluated the performance of the different approaches. Such a comparison is essential to predict the performance of the approaches under realistic conditions. In this paper, we present a quantitative evaluation of eight approaches for tracking virus particles. We have investigated deterministic and probabilistic approaches. The evaluation is based on nine real microscopy image sequences of virus particles, for which ground truth was obtained by manual tracking.