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DeepSperm: A robust and real-time bull sperm-cell detection in densely populated semen videos
Priyanto Hidayatullah1, Xueting Wang2, Toshihiko Yamasaki2
1School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Bandung, 40132, Indonesia; Computer Engineering and Informatics Department, Politeknik Negeri Bandung, Kabupaten Bandung Barat, 40559, Indonesia.
Background And Objective:
Object detection is a primary research interest in computer vision. Sperm-cell detection in a densely populated bull semen microscopic observation video presents challenges that are more difficult than those presented by other general object-detection cases. These challenges include partial occlusion, vast number of objects in a single video frame, tiny size of the object, artifacts, low contrast, low video resolution, and blurry objects because of the rapid movement of the sperm cells. This study proposes a deep neural network architecture, called DeepSperm, that solves the aforementioned problems and is more accurate and faster than state-of-the-art architectures.
Methods:
In the proposed architecture, we use only one detection layer, which is specific for small object detection. For handling overfitting and increasing accuracy, we set a higher input network resolution, use a dropout layer, and perform data augmentation on saturation and exposure. Several hyper-parameters are tuned to achieve better performance. Mean average precision (mAP), confusion matrix, precision, recall, and F1-score are used to measure accuracy. Frame per second (fps) is used to measure speed. We compare our proposed method with you only look once (YOLO) v3 and YOLOv4.
Results:
In our experiment, we achieve 94.11 mAP on the test dataset, F1-score of 0.93, and a processing speed of 51.9 fps. In comparison with YOLOv4, our proposed method is 2.18 x faster on testing, and 2.9 x faster on training with a small dataset, while achieving comparative detection accuracy. The weights file size was also reduced significantly, with one-twentieth that of YOLOv4. Moreover, it requires a 1.07 x less graphical processing unit (GPU) memory than YOLOv4.
Conclusions:
This study proposes DeepSperm, which is a simple, effective, and efficient deep neural network architecture with its hyper-parameters and configuration to detect bull sperm cells robustly in real time. In our experiments, we surpass the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy, speed, and resource needs.
