An Improved Particle Filter With a Novel Hybrid Proposal Distribution for Quantitative Analysis of Gold Immunochromatographic Strips

In this paper, a novel statistical pattern recognition method is proposed for accurately segmenting test and control lines from the gold immunochromatographic strip (GICS) images for the benefits of quantitative analysis. A new dynamic state-space model is established, based on which the segmentation task of test and control lines is transformed into a state estimation problem. Especially, the transition equation is utilized to describe the relationship between contour points on the upper and the lower boundaries of test and control lines, and a new observation equation is developed by combining the contrast of between-class variance and the uniformity measure. Then, an innovative particle filter (PF) with a hybrid proposal distribution, namely, deep-belief-network-based particle filter (DBN-PF) is put forward, where the deep belief network (DBN) provides an initial recognition result in the hybrid proposal distribution, and the particle swarm optimization algorithm moves particles to regions of high likelihood. The performance of proposed DBN-PF method is comprehensively evaluated on not only an artificial dataset but also the GICS images in terms of several indices as compared to the PF and DBN methods. It is demonstrated via experiment results that the proposed approach is effective in quantitative analysis of GICS.