of interest, the objects to be tracked have widely differing and even time-varying
appearances. As a consequence, full automation usually can be achieved only by
developing very dedicated algorithms that are tuned for the specific application.
This explains why existing commercial tracking software tools, which are devel-
oped for broad, general applicability, often fail to yield satisfactory results for
specific tracking tasks.
In this section we discuss published approaches to automated object tracking
in time-lapse microscopy images. A distinction is made between cell tracking and
particle tracking. Two different strategies exist for both problems. The first
consists of the identification of the objects of interest in the entire image
sequence, separately ...