Towards the Automatic Reconstruction of Dendritic Trees using Particle Filters

The 3D reconstruction of a Golgi-stained dendritic tree from a serial stack of images captured with a transmitted light bright-field microscope is investigated. Modifications to the boot-strap filter are discussed such that the tree structure may be estimated recursively as a series of connected segments. The tracking performance of the bootstrap particle filter is compared against Differential Evolution, an evolutionary global optimisation method, both in terms of robustness and accuracy. It is found that the particle filtering approach is significantly more robust and accurate for the data considered.