SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 689-716, January 2021.
We target the problem of estimating the center of mass of objects in noisy two-dimensional images. We assume that the noise dominates the image, and thus many standard approaches are vulnerable to estimation errors, e.g., the direct computation of the center of mass and the geometric median which is a robust alternative to the center of mass. In this paper, we define a novel surrogate function to the center of mass. We present a mathematical and numerical analysis of our method and show that it outperforms existing methods for estimating the center of mass of an object in various realistic scenarios. As a case study, we apply our centering method to data from single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), where the goal is to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of macromolecules. We show how to apply our approach for a better translational alignment of molecule images picked from experimental data. In this way, we facilitate the succeeding steps of reconstruction and streamline the entire cryo-EM pipeline, saving computational time and supporting resolution enhancement.

中文翻译：

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使用 Cryo-EM 对噪声图像进行居中

SIAM 影像科学杂志，第 14 卷，第 2 期，第 689-716 页，2021 年 1 月。
我们的目标是在嘈杂的二维图像中估计物体的质心。我们假设噪声在图像中占主导地位，因此许多标准方法容易受到估计错误的影响，例如，质心的直接计算和作为质心的稳健替代方案的几何中值。在本文中，我们定义了一个新的质心替代函数。我们对我们的方法进行了数学和数值分析，并表明它优于在各种现实场景中估计物体质心的现有方法。作为案例研究，我们将定心方法应用于来自单粒子低温电子显微镜 (cryo-EM) 的数据，其目标是重建大分子的三维结构。我们展示了如何应用我们的方法对从实验数据中挑选的分子图像进行更好的平移对齐。通过这种方式，我们促进了重建的后续步骤，并简化了整个冷冻电镜管道，节省了计算时间并支持分辨率增强。