MOTIVATION: The revolution in light sheet microscopy enables the concurrent observation of thousands of dynamic processes, from single molecules to cellular organelles, with high spatiotemporal resolution. However, challenges in the interpretation of multidimensional data requires the fully automatic measurement of those motions to link local processes to cellular functions. This includes the design and the implementation of image processing pipelines able to deal with diverse motion types, and 3D visualization tools adapted to the human visual system. RESULTS: Here, we describe a new method for 3D motion estimation that addresses the aforementioned issues. We integrate 3D matching and variational approach to handle a diverse range of motion without any prior on the shape of moving objects. We compare different similarity measures to cope with intensity ambiguities and demonstrate the effectiveness of the Census signature for both stages. Additionally, we present two intuitive visualization approaches to adapt complex 3D measures into an interpretable 2D view, and a novel way to assess the quality of flow estimates in absence of ground truth. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://team.inria.fr/serpico/data/3d-optical-flow-data/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

One of the major challenges in multiple particle tracking is the capture of extremely heterogeneous movements of objects in crowded scenes. The presence of numerous assignment candidates in the expected range of particle motion makes the tracking ambiguous and induces false positives. Lowering the ambiguity by reducing the search range, on the other hand, is not an option, as this would increase the rate of false negatives. We propose here a piecewise-stationary motion model (PMM) for the particle transport along an iterative smoother that exploits recursive tracking in multiple rounds in forward and backward temporal directions. By fusing past and future information, our method, termed PMMS, can recover fast transitions from freely or confined diffusive to directed motions with linear time complexity. To avoid false positives, we complemented recursive tracking with a robust inline estimator of the search radius for assignment (a.k.a. gating), where past and future information are exploited using only two frames at each optimization step. We demonstrate the improvement of our technique on simulated data especially the impact of density, variation in frame to frame displacements, and motion switching probability. We evaluated our technique on the 2D particle tracking challenge dataset published by Chenouard et al. in 2014. Using high SNR to focus on motion modeling challenges, we show superior performance at high particle density. On biological applications, our algorithm allows us to quantify the extremely small percentage of motor-driven movements of fluorescent particles along microtubules in a dense field of unbound, diffusing particles. We also show with virus imaging that our algorithm can cope with a strong reduction in recording frame rate while keeping the same performance relative to methods relying on fast sampling.

In this paper, we present a stochastic NL-means-based de-noising algorithm for generalized non-parametric noise models. First, we provide a statistical interpretation to current patch-based neighborhood filters and justify the Bayesian inference that needs to explicitly accounts for discrepancies between the model and the data. Furthermore, we investigate the Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) rejection method combined with density learning techniques for handling situations where the posterior is intractable or too prohibitive to calculate. We demonstrate our stochastic Gamma NL-means (SGNL) on real images corrupted by non-Gaussian noise.

We propose a robust statistical framework for reconstructing lifetime map corrupted by vesicle motion in frequency domain FLIM imaging. Instrumental noise is taken into account to improve lifetime estimation. Robust M-estimators and ML-estimators allow to jointly estimate motion and lifetime. Performances are demonstrated on simulated and real samples.