Optical flow-based non-rigid registration of cell nuclei: Global model with adaptively weighted regularization

Abstract

Optical flow models can be used for solving non-rigid registration problems of cell nuclei in time-lapse microscopy images. In contrast to local optical flow models employed in existing non-rigid registration methods, we introduce a method based on global optical flow models. We analyze the properties of fluorescence cell microscopy images and find that for regularization of the deformation fields, a convex quadratic regularizer is more suitable than non-convex ones. We further propose an adaptive weighting global method that is derived based on properties of the image noise. Experiments using real live cell microscopy images demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous methods as well as general methods based on global optical flow models with non-convex regularizers.