Detection of Biological Cells in Phase-Contrast Microscopy Images

In this paper, we propose an automatic method to obtain cells detection and cells migration tracking in order to analyze cells behaviors under different conditions. The images were obtained using phase-contrast video microscopy method. Proposed method normalizes original images in order to increase image contrast, and a classification process based on variance operator determines the nature of pixels in the image as cells or background. Each detected cell is associated to its centroid in order to initialize the tracking procedure to quantify the migration process. This technique is a fast way to describe cells migrations, robust to cell contracts and mitosis, all over their trajectories.