Reconstruction of dynamic 3-D structures of biological objects using stereo microscopy

The authors address the analysis of three dimensional shape and shape change in nonrigid biological objects imaged via a stereo light microscope (SLM). Most existing stereo or motion analysis techniques cannot be applied to microscopic biological images because they usually lack salient features. The authors propose an integrated approach for the reconstruction of 3D structures and motion analysis for scenes where only a few informative features are available. The key components of this framework are: (1) image registration, (2) region-of-interest extraction, and (3) stereo and motion analysis using a cooperative spatial and temporal matching process. The authors describe these three stages of processing and illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach using real images of a live frog´s ventricle. The reconstructed dynamic 3-D structures of the ventricle are demonstrated in the authors´ experimental results