An Optimal Policy for Target Localization with Application to Electron Microscopy

This paper considers the task of finding a target location by making a limited number of sequential observations. Each observation results from evaluating an imperfect classifier of a chosen cost and accuracy on an interval of chosen length and position. Within a Bayesian framework, we study the problem of minimizing an objective that combines the entropy of the posterior distribution with the cost of the questions asked. In this problem, we show that the one-step lookahead policy is Bayes-optimal for any arbitrary time horizon. Moreover, this one-step lookahead policy is easy to compute and implement. We then use this policy in the context of localizing mitochondria in electron microscope images, and experimentally show that significant speed ups in acquisition can be gained, while maintaining near equal image quality at target locations, when compared to current policies.