Detection of virus particles in noisy spot-scan electron cryomicroscopy images

We present a method to identify and extract virus particle images from noisy spot-scan electron cryomicroscopy images. We use a template matching algorithm to identify virus particles. Due to the high spatial variation and low contrast of these images we employ a series of preprocessing operations before performing the template matching. These preprocessing operations detect and remove the black areas present in spot-scan images using spatial histogram operations and binary mathematical morphology. Following the detailed description of our method we discuss the consistency and accuracy of particle selection