Automatic cleavage detection in H.264 sequence of human embryo development

Automated human embryo assessment/grading techniques need to be developed to enhance In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) outcome by selecting embryos with highest implantation potentials. Recently, a number of embryo assessment/grading algorithms have been proposed, however, none of these techniques are fully automatic. In addition, they generally suffer from high computational cost, since they perform extensive computational processing in the spatial domain on every single image/frame. Video compressed domain event detection could play a key role in practicalization and automation of human embryo quality assessment. In this work, a human embryo cleavage detection (CD) technique is proposed in compressed H.264 domain. By doing so, the expensive spatial domain processing is directed to where it is most needed. The performance of the proposed method is verified using two sequences of human embryo development.