2 research outputs found
Serial section registration of axonal confocal microscopy datasets for long-range neural circuit reconstruction
ManuscriptIn the context of long-range digital neural circuit reconstruction, this paper investigates an approach for registering axons across histological serial sections. Tracing distinctly labeled axons over large distances allows neuroscientists to study very explicit relationships between the brain's complex interconnects and, for example, diseases or aberrant development. Large scale histological analysis requires, however, that the tissue be cut into sections. In immunohistochemical studies thin sections are easily distorted due to the cutting, preparation, and slide mounting processes. In this work we target the registration of thin serial sections containing axons. Sections are first traced to extract axon centerlines, and these traces are used to define registration landmarks where they intersect section boundaries. The trace data also provides distinguishing information regarding an axon's size and orientation within a section. We propose the use of these features when pairing axons across sections in addition to utilizing the spatial relationships amongst the landmarks. The global rotation and translation of an unregistered section are accounted for using a random sample consensus (RANSAC) based technique. An iterative nonrigid refinement process using B-spline warping is then used to reconnect axons and produce the sought after connectivity information
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Improved temporal correspondences in stereo-vision by RANSAC
Determining the image correspondences of scene points in two or more views remain elusive especially for large baselines and (or) rotations. Assuming a calibrated stereo rig, we propose two novel RANSAC-based algorithms to establish temporal correspondences of triplet and quadruplet matches in two stereo pairs robustly. We devise an efficient technique for the absolute orientation problem with minimum three matches [B. Horn et al., 1987]. This drastically reduces the number of random samplings, for a given probability of selecting no outlier in at least one set, compared to the application of the 7-/8-point algorithms [Z. Zhang et al., 1995, P. Torr and D. Murray, 1997]. Within the general RANSAC paradigm, a low-cost selective random sampling scheme is incorporated to further enhance the robustness of the algorithm that utilizes quadruplet matches