  A reliable extraction of filament data from microscopic images is of high
interest in the analysis of acto-myosin structures as early morphological
markers in mechanically guided differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells
and the understanding of the underlying fiber arrangement processes. In this
paper, we propose the filament sensor (FS), a fast and robust processing
sequence which detects and records location, orientation, length and width for
each single filament of an image, and thus allows for the above described
analysis. The extraction of these features has previously not been possible
with existing methods. We evaluate the performance of the proposed FS in terms
of accuracy and speed in comparison to three existing methods with respect to
their limited output. Further, we provide a benchmark dataset of real cell
images along with filaments manually marked by a human expert as well as
simulated benchmark images. The FS clearly outperforms existing methods in
terms of computational runtime and filament extraction accuracy. The
implementation of the FS and the benchmark database are available as open
source.
