Restoring Artifact-Free Microscopy Image Sequences

Abstract

Phase contrast and differential interference contrast, which are used to capture microscopy images of living cells, contain a few artifacts such as halo and shadow-cast effect. Removing these artifacts from microscopy images facilitates automated microscopy image analysis, such as the cell segmentation that is a critical step in cell tracking systems. We propose a restoration algorithm based on the microscopy imaging model and consider temporal consistency when restoring time-lapse microscopy image sequences. The artifact-free microscopy images are restored by minimizing a regularized quadratic cost function that is adaptable to input image properties. Our method achieves high segmentation accuracy and low computational cost compared to the previous methods.