A novel multi-cell tracking algorithm based on ant colony behavior

This paper aims to develop a novel framework of multi-cell tracking using intelligent ant system, in which a priori colony distribution block is first proposed to directly place birth ants on relevant pixels of current image through kernel density probability estimate of background; afterwards, a multi-colony reconstruction block is developed to further attract ants towards potential regions according to heuristic histogram similarity and pixel pheromone level with an appropriate evaporation and propagation model; finally, a cell state extraction block is implemented to adaptively determine the number of cells and their individual states. Experiment results on real cell image sequences demonstrate that our algorithm could give a more accurate and robust performance than other methods.