Accurate Detection in Volumetric Images Using Elastic Registration Based Validation

In this paper, we propose a method for accurate detection and segmentation of cells in dense plant tissue of Arabidopsis Thaliana. We build upon a system that uses a top down approach to yield the cell segmentations: A discriminative detection is followed by an elastic alignment of a cell template. While this works well for cells with a distinct appearance, it fails once the detection step cannot produce reliable initializations for the alignment. We propose a validation method for the aligned cell templates and show that we can thereby increase the average precision substantially.