Accurate and robust spot tracking is a necessary tool for quantitative motion analysis in fluorescence microscopy images. In this work, we exploits the underlying stationary motion in biological systems, e.g. the movement of crowds, bacteria swarming and cyclosis in plant cells, and then propose a multi-frame optical flow based tracker. We obtain the stationary motion by adapting a recent optical flow algorithm that relates one image to another locally using an all-pass filter. We perform this operation over all the image frames simultaneously and estimate a single, stationary optical flow. We compare the proposed tracker with two existing techniques and show that our approach is more robust to high noise and varying structure. In addition, we also show initial experiments on real microscopy images.

Demo page: http://www.ee.cuhk.edu.hk/~jzli/SLAPTracker/