Scalable Tracing of Electron Micrographs by Fusing Top Down and Bottom Up Cues Using Hypergraph Diffusion

A novel framework for robust 3D tracing in electron micrographs is presented. The proposed framework is built using ideas from hypergraph diffusion, and achieves two main objectives. Firstly, the approach scales to trace hundreds of targets without noticeable increase in runtime complexity. Secondly, the framework yields flexibility to fuse top down (global cues as hyperedges) and bottom up (local superpixels as nodes) information. Subsequently, a procedure for auto-seeding to initialize the tracing procedure is proposed. The paper concludes with experimental validation on a challenging large scale tracing problem for simultaneously tracing 95 structures, illustrating applicability of the proposed algorithm.