Video Processing of Sperm Tails

I need to be able record the frequency and amplitude of sperm tail movement as seen in the below video. Any suggestions?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15tMUcwfKDfe7beJGDq05uKzinYuR5IAQ/view?usp=sharing

[Sam Chak]

I manually counted that the sperm whipped its flagellum-like tail between 50 to 55 times during the course of 14 seconds.

Answer 1

[Udit06]

Hi Ahmed,

To record the frequency and amplitude of sperm tail movement stored in the video, you can do the following:

1) Detect the sperms present in each frame.

For this you will need to convert the video frames into binary image so that the sperm tails are seperated from the background. You can use Otsu thresholding to achieve the same. You can refer to the following documentation to understand more about Otsu method.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/images/ref/graythresh.html

After this, you will have to remove noise from the binary image.You can use morphological operations like erosion and dilation for the same. Refer to the following documentation for more details. Once a clean image is obtained, you can search for the connected components in the image. These should correspond to the sperm tails.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/images/morphological-dilation-and-erosion.html

2) Once the sperms are detected, calculate the centroid of each sperm tail detected. You can use the vision.pointTracker to track motion of sperm tails across multiple frames of the video. Refer to the following documentation for more details.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/vision/ref/vision.pointtracker-system-object.html

3) You can now analyze movement patterns of the centroids to extract the frequency and amplitude information.

I hope this helps.