A variational method for leukocyte detection

In this paper, we propose a variational method for the detection of leukocytes observed in vivo. An adaptive threshold surface is constructed automatically using boundary information from the image. The surface is created using an objective functional that is minimized via a variational approach. This surface is constrained by an edge field that is also computed with a variational method. Objects extracted from background are pruned according to two geometric criteria. In the experiments, we find the false positive rate of the detector and show that the proposed approach can automatically and accurately identify multiple rolling leukocytes in vivo.