Tracking the motion of Myxococcus xanthus is a crucial step for fundamental bacteria studies. Large number of bacterial cells involved, limited image resolution, and various cell behaviors (e.g., division) make tracking a highly challenging problem. A common strategy is to segment the cells first and associate detected cells into moving trajectories. However, known detection association algorithms that run in polynomial time are either ineffective to deal with particular cell behaviors or sensitive to segmentation errors. In this paper, we propose a polynomial time hierarchical approach for associating segmented cells, using a new Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) based matching model. Our method is able to track cell motion when cells may divide, leave/enter the image window, and the segmentation results may incur false alarm, detection lost, and falsely merged/split detections. We demonstrate it on tracking M. xanthus. Applied to error-prone segmented cells, our algorithm exhibits higher track purity and produces more complete trajectories, comparing to several state-of-the-art detection association algorithms.
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