Box it and track it: a weakly supervised framework for cell trackingShow others and affiliations
2026 (English)In: Pattern Recognition: 47th DAGM German Conference, DAGM GCPR 2025, Freiburg, Germany, September 23–26, 2025. Proceedings / [ed] Margret Keuper; Francesco Locatello, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2026, p. 3-17Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Accurate cell tracking in microscopy is essential for studying biological dynamics like proliferation and migration. Traditional fully supervised methods demand dense pixel-wise masks for every frame, making them impractical for large-scale use. Recent methods like SAT reduce annotation effort by using sparse point-based supervision, but still require multiple positive and negative points per cell, which remains labor-intensive. BoxTrack offers a lightweight and annotation-efficient alternative, requiring only a single bounding box per cell in the first frame. Without relying on any point-level annotations, it performs end-to-end instance segmentation and tracking over entire sequences. This simplification leads to a substantial reduction in annotation cost while improving performance over SAT. On the CTMC dataset, BoxTrack improves Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) by +15.96% over SAT. For the CTC dataset, it yields a +8.86% MOTA gain. Code is available at https://github.com/nabeelkhalid92/Box-it-Track-it.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2026. p. 3-17
Series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ISSN 0302-9743, E-ISSN 1611-3349 ; 16125
Keywords [en]
Cell Tracking, Deep Learning, Microscopy, Segment Anything, Temporal Downsampling, Weak Supervision
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-249019DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-12840-9_1Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105027641069ISBN: 978-3-032-12839-3 (print)ISBN: 978-3-032-12840-9 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-249019DiVA, id: diva2:2035879
Conference
47th DAGM German Conference on Pattern Recognition, DAGM GCPR 2025, Freiburg, Germany, September 23-26, 2025.
2026-02-052026-02-052026-02-05Bibliographically approved