A fast method for particle picking in cryo-electron micrographs based on fast R-CNN

We propose a fast method to automatically pick protein particles in cryo-EM micrographs, which is now completed manually in practice. Our method is based on Fast R-CNN, with sliding window as the regions proposal solution. To reduce the false positive detections, we set a single class for the major contaminant ice, and pick out all the ice particles in the whole datasets. Tests on the recently-published cryo-EM data of three proteins have demonstrated that our approach can automatically accomplish the human-level particle picking task, and we successfully reduce the test time from 1.5 minutes of previous deep learning method to 2 seconds without any recall or precision losses. Our program is available under the MIT License at https://github.com/xiao1fan/FastParticlePicker.