Tracking single microtubules by using B-spline curves and Hausdorff distance

Microtubule gliding assays can be used to analyze the dynamics of microtubules driven by molecular motors on the glass surface from the viewpoint of soft matters and molecular robotics. Microtubule tracking requires methods of image processing, microtubule shape extraction and motion path search through the video frames of the gliding assays. A translation from a bit image to a mathematical image is essential to realize computational analysis including microtubule tracking from the viewpoint of computational cost and analytical algorithms. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the B-spline curve representation for tracking an identical microtubule with its length and Hausdorff distance.