MATLAB: How to apply active contours image segmentation to a video

Question

Hi all,

I have a number of videos with edge detection appropriately applied to a cluster of cells. I am trying to segment them so that after I can measure their change in area over time but am afraid I dont know how to apply the segmentation to a video.

I read on another post that you could apply it to the first frame then use that frame as a hallmark for the others, would that work?

See a single frame attached to understand what I am working with for now, unfortunately the videos are too large to attach.

Thanks,

Ben

Answer 1

I have no idea what you want to do. With an edge detection, you will have lots of curves, most of which will not be closed contours. So what do you want to do with all those curves? Compare their curve lengths over time? If your plant is wiggling, then the curves will be drastically changing. Not only changing, but the label (ID number) of a given curve will change, making it extremely hard to track one particular curve. Imagine you just had 50 random curves on one frame. Now imagine in the next frame you had 62 curves that have completely different coordinates. How do you match up the 50 in one frame to the 62 in the next frame? Tracking is not easy. Even for me it would take several months of work to get something not even 100% robust. You might look into professional, commercial tracking software, or look into optical flow as a metric that hopefully means something relevant.