In this section, I will briefly describe an image-processing problem that we will try to solve using a plugin. The problem is a general one that is encountered in many experiments involving living cells or organisms: they move and change shape. When we want to quantify certain aspects of the cells that we have imaged, we need to perform three basic steps:
Detect the object of interest.
Measure our object in the current frame.
Detect each object in our time series independently.
These steps are encountered in many different problems involving time series. For each of the three steps, we need to create a solution that solves the problem or quantifies the object in a meaningful manner. For detection, we can think of many methods that may be suitable to detect the object. When we think back to the topics discussed in Chapter 4, Image Segmentation and Feature Extraction with ImageJ we may think of a threshold-based technique to segment the image, and use a particle analyzer...