A new technique for motion estimation of microorganisms in the Hartley domain

This paper proposes a technique for estimating motion of micro-organisms using the discrete Hartley transform (DHT). The Hartley transform has properties similar to those of the Fourier transform, but has speed and memory advantages over the Fourier transform, discrete cosine transform (DCT) or discrete sine transform (DST) based methods. First denoising is carried out using a soft threshold and a method similar to wavelet denoising. This method is more robust to noise introduced in the image sequence due to variation of illumination, and offset in average intensity. Next, motion detection is carried out using a two-stage temporal change detection technique. A block matching technique in the frequency domain is proposed which can detect microorganism motion by using the phase shift property of the DHT. Position estimation of multiple objects can be performed using this technique.