This web page supplements the paper entitled Particle Tracking Accuracy Measurement Based on Comparison of Linear Oriented Forests. The paper provides a rigorous mathematical description and an extensive analysis of the particle tracking results generated within the Particle Tracking Challenge. The measure is based on linear oriented forests matching, thus abbreviated as LOFM measure.
Particle tracking is of fundamental importance in diverse quantitative analyses of dynamic intracellular processes using time-lapse microscopy. Due to frequent impracticability of tracking particles manually, a number of fully automated algorithms have been developed over past decades, carrying out the tracking task in two subsequent phases: (1) particle detection and (2) particle linking. An objective benchmark for assessing the performance of such algorithms was recently established by the Particle Tracking Challenge. Because its performance evaluation protocol finds correspondences between a reference and algorithm-generated tracking result at the level of individual tracks, the performance assessment strongly depends on the algorithm linking capabilities. Our performance evaluation protocol, based on a simplified version of the tracking accuracy measure employed in the Cell Tracking Challenge, establishes the correspondences at the level of individual particle detections, thus allowing one to evaluate the performance of each of the two phases in an isolated, unbiased manner. The complete scoring list of all 14 algorithms that competed in the Particle Tracking Challenge, compiled using our evaluation protocol, can be found here.
The implementation of the LOFM measure is made publicly available in the form of an Icy plugin. In case of any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at xmaska@fi.muni.cz or pam@fi.muni.cz.
The development of the LOFM measure was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under the grant number GJ16-03909Y.