Local affine texture tracking for serial registration of zebrafish images

The aim of this work is to register serial in-vivo confocal mi- croscopy images of zebrafish to enable accurate cell tracking on corresponding fluorescence images. The following prob- lem arises during acquisition; the zebrafish tail may undergoe a series of movement and non-linear deformations, which if not corrected, adds to the motion of leukocytes being tracked. This makes it difficult to accurately assess their motion. We developed a correlation based, local affine image matching method, which is well suited to the textured DIC images of the anatomy of the zebrafish and enables accurate and efficient tracking of image regions over successive frames. Experi- mental results of the serial registration and tracking demon- strate its accuracy in estimating local affine motions in ze- brafish sequences.