Computer-Aided Sperm Analysis (CASA) systems play a critical role in diagnosing fertility issues. They are essential for treating infertility in humans and are equally valuable in the domain of domestic animal reproduction, where they support studies on sperm competition and wildlife semen assessment. However, the lack of publicly available datasets and the difficulties associated with data labelling constitute a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a solution to address this challenge by introducing a synthetic data generation approach based on a parametric model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by successfully addressing two key sperm analysis tasks: sperm count and sperm motility assessment. Our proposed system uses synthetic data for training and is validated with real-world boar sperm images. The results obtained show a mean average precision (mAP) of 84.3% for the sperm count task, and a multiple object tracking accuracy (MOTA) of 80.5% for motility estimation task. Furthermore, the computational requirements of our solution are minimal, enabling its execution on embedded systems and facilitating its integration into professional CASA systems.
We have collected a boar sperm dataset called BOSS gathered with the help of expert technicians. This images present hundreds of individuals, as boar sperm has a higher concentration than human sperm.
In order to avoid the process of labelling hundreds of heads, we have created a synthetic dataset. This dataset is generated through a parametric model characterized from the measurements of the composing elements.
We have tested our synthetic dataset training lightweight detection models such as YOLOv5 to be able to count the total number of spermatozoa. This models are validated with real videos from BOSS, with results of over 84% in mAP.
To complete a real CASA system we use the previous detection to characterize the movement of each individual. The tracking is done with the well-known Kalman filter, obtaining a good and fast estimation of the postion and speed, with a MOTA of 80.5%.
Under review