Extended Data Fig. 2: Impact of grouping across grouping radius for different averaging weights.

Predictions in consecutive frames are grouped when they are closer to each other than the given grouping radius. A grouping radius of 0 nm corresponds to not performing any grouping. Predictions within a group are assigned a common set of emitter coordinates which is calculated as weighted average of their individual coordinates. We compare three different options for the weighted average: Uniform weighting (‘None’, solid lines); Weighting by the inferred number of photons for CSpline and DECODE or the inferred confidence for DeepSTORM3D (‘photons’, dotted line); Weighting by the predicted DECODE σ values, where the x,y and z values are individually weighted by \({\sigma }_{x,y,z}^{-2}\). a, b): 3D efficiencies across grouping radii. Grouping is especially useful in the low density setting (a) where DECODE without temporal context (DECODE single) with a correctly set grouping radius can match the performance of DECODE with temporal context (DECODE multi) without grouping. This is, however, only the case when weighting by the uncertainty estimates that DECODE provides. Using grouping on top of DECODE multi offers little additional benefit. c, d): Number of groups divided by the number of localizations. Detecting all emitters and correctly grouping them would result in a ratio of 1:3 as on average each emitter is visible in three consecutive frames. See methods and Supplementary Table 1 for additional details on training and evaluation.