The spherical harmonic based resolution increase and decrease method for cell mesh model with the vertex and face numbers consistency

Abstract

To understand the life cycle, status and mechanisms of cells, the analyses of cell shape, morphology, deformation, features on the cell membrane and movement play very important roles in those studies. With the growth of imaging, scanning, microscopy, and computational technologies, we now can obtain the image data of the cells and then reconstruct the 3D mesh models of the cells in quicker and more convenient ways. However, due to some limitations, the high-resolution cell image cannot be obtained and it will cause the low-resolution of the 3D cell mesh model after the 3D mesh model reconstruction. On the other hand, too much high resolution of the cell image will turn out to be largely time-consuming when analyzing the membrane or morphology of the cells. To study the changes of cell membrane or morphology like protrusions in the different time points, the vertex and face numbers consistency of the 3D cell mesh models will greatly help to reduce the efforts of data preprocessing. In this study, we proposed the method that applied spherical harmonic, a widely applied method to cell morphology study, to increase and decrease the resolution of cell mesh model from the low- or high-resolution cell images, and reconstruct the 3D cell mesh models with the consistence numbers of vertex and face.