Tracking live cells in 4D microscopy: From active surfaces to active meshes

Deformable models have proven to be particularly adapted to multiple cell segmentation and tracking in biology, thanks to their flexibility, robustness to noise and quantitative interpretability. In the context of 4D microscopy, two concurrent techniques have been developed: an active surfaces model, based on an implicit contour formulation, and an active meshes model, based on an explicit formulation. This paper describes and confronts both approaches in terms of quantitative results and computational cost on simulated and real biological sequences, in order to provide an objective review of their strengths and weaknesses.