A variety of image and signal processing algorithms based on wavelet filtering tools have been developed during the last few decades, that are well adapted to the experimental variability typically encountered in live biological microscopy. A number of processing tools are reviewed, that use wavelets for adaptive image restoration and for motion or brightness variation analysis by optical flow computation. The usefulness of these tools for biological imaging is illustrated in the context of the restoration of images of the inner ear and the analysis of cochlear motion patterns in two and three dimensions. I also report on recent work that aims at capturing fluorescence intensity changes associated with vesicle dynamics at synaptic zones of sensory hair cells. This latest application requires one to separate the intensity variations associated with the physiological process under study from the variations caused by motion of the observed structures. A wavelet optical flow algorithm for doing this is presented, and its effectiveness is demonstrated on artificial and experimental image sequences.

Date Published: 20 September 2007
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 6701, Wavelets XII, 67010F (20 September 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.732336

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6701:
Wavelets XII
Dimitri Van De Ville; Vivek K. Goyal; Manos Papadakis, Editor(s)