Curve Extraction by Geodesics Fusion: Application to Polymer Reptation Analysis

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. In the molecular field, researchers analyze dynamics of polymers by microscopy: several measurements such as length and curvature are performed in their studies. To achieve correct analysis they need to extract the curve representing as good as possible the observed polymer shape which is a grayscale thick curve with noise and blur. We propose, in this paper, a method to extract such a curve. A polymer chain moves in a snake-like fashion (Reptation): it can self-intersect and form several complex geometries. To efficiently extract the different geometries, we generate the curve by computing a piecewise centerline browsing the shape by ge…