Conservation Tracking

The quality of any tracking-by-assignment hinges on the accuracy of the foregoing target detection / segmentation step. In many kinds of images, errors in this first stage are unavoidable. These errors then propagate to, and corrupt, the tracking result. Our main contribution is the first probabilistic graphical model that can explicitly account for over- and under segmentation errors even when the number of tracking targets is unknown and when they may divide, as in cell cultures. The tracking model we present implements global consistency constraints for the number of targets comprised by each detection and is solved to global optimality on reasonably large 2D+t and 3D+t datasets. In addition, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of a post processing that allows to establish target identity even across occlusion / under segmentation. The usefulness and efficiency of this new tracking method is demonstrated on three different and challenging 2D+t and 3D+t datasets from developmental biology.