Biomedical application of target tracking in clutter

The movement of leukocytes (white blood cells) and their interaction with the endothelium (vessel wall) provides valuable information about the mechanism of inflammation and inflammatory disease. In order to investigate leukocyte motion within living animals, advanced automated tracking algorithms are requisite. We introduce military target tracking algorithms for the purpose of tracking cell movement. In 33 experiments, we compare the tracking performance of five trackers. The trackers tested include the centroid tracker, the correlation tracker, an enhanced centroid tracker, an enhanced correlation tracker and an active contour (snake) tracker. Of the five methods, the snake tracker proved to be the most robust method in terms of the highest percentage of frames tracked and the lowest root mean-squared error. The paper provides an overview of the five trackers and gives experimental results.