Estimation of the flow of particles within a partition of the image domain in fluorescence video-microscopy

Automatic analysis of the dynamic content in fluorescence video-microscopy is crucial for understanding molecular mechanisms involved in cell functions. In this paper, we propose an original approach for analyzing particle trafficking in these sequences. Instead of individually tracking every particle, we estimate the particle flows between predefined regions. This approach allows us to process image sequences with a high number of particles and a low frame rate. We investigate several ways to estimate the particle flow at the cellular level and evaluate their performance in synthetic and real image sequences.