Speeding Up Video Processing for Blastocyst Microinjection

This paper describes machine vision techniques that provide fast visual feedback for an automatic blastocyst microinjection system. The goals of the vision processing were to locate and track both the blastocysts and manipulation pipettes within the images and throughout the microinjection process. This was successfully accomplished using Hough transforms and cross-correlation template matching. Emphasis here is placed on a detailed description of the techniques applied to the algorithm to speed-up the matching and to enable real-time visual feedback. These techniques allowed the algorithm to be, on average, 857 times faster than the original algorithm. This converts into a 99.88% reduction in the template matching processing time