Cellsnake: A new active contour technique for cell/fibre segmentation

Active contours are a well known segmentation toolkit and widely adopted in various forms for biological image analysis. Most techniques are commonly based on object geometry but overlapping regions cause severe problems to contour propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel active contour technique (“cellsnake”) for solving this problem with an application to cell and fibre segmentation. Given that the transparency of overlapped objects is unavailable, we present a new set of contour forces derived from a-priori knowledge of cell geometry that allows the contour to deform correctly in those regions. We combine these terms with other existing forces and we show that cellsnake gives appropriate shape estimation of the objects especially in areas ahowing overlapping.