Integrated Model for Understanding Pollen Tube Growth in Video

Pollen tube growth is an essential part of the sexual reproductive process in plants. It is the result of a complex interaction of cytoplasmic contents (proteins, ions, cellular structures, etc.). Existing pollen tube models use differential equations to represent these complex intra-cellular interactions that lead to growth. As a result of this complex nature, these models are not used to verify the shape and growth behavior observed in living cells. We present a method of analyzing the growth behavior of pollen tubes in experimental videos through affine transformations on the detected cell tip. The method relies on underlying biological knowledge about the growth process and leverages these processes to determine tip morphology. Experimental results on videos of growing pollen tube cells show that our method is superior to the current method of treating cell tip morphology as well as adaptive active appearance models.