Automatic Recognition of DNA Pliers in Atomic Force Microscopy Images

Abstract

Bottom-up fabrication techniques are expected to alleviate the limitations of top-down fabrication. Bottom-up fabrication requires self-assembling facilities to construct complex structures including DNA nanostructures, DNA robots, further molecular robots, and so on. DNA origami is one of buttom-up fabrication techniques. In this paper, we focus on the automatic recognition of flexible DNA origami named “DNA pliers” in AFM (atomic force microscopy) image. Auto recognition of DNA pliers is challenging and necessary since DNA pliers can have several forms: parallel, cross, and anti-parallel forms, depending on hinge angles. Our method uses the information of the curvature scale space method and convexity-concavity detection extracted from DNA pliers. The experiments show that the combination of the curvature scale space method and convexity-concavity detection can work well for DNA pliers recognition if appropriate contour information for the DNA pliers is available from an AFM image.