A Watershed Based Segmentation Method for Overlapping Chromosome Images

Chromosome segmentation affects the performance of the chromosome automatic analysis systems. Watershed algorithm is a widely used segmentation method. Applying it to segment chromosome images can overcome the difficulty caused by overlapping chromosomes. But the vice of the algorithm is its over-segmentation results. An algorithm based on watershed was presented in this paper. The overlapping chromosome images were obtained by a series of pretreatments. Then the distance transform was used to treat these images. The results of the transformation were used as input images for the watershed algorithm. The experiment proved that this algorithm can segment the overlapping chromosomes successfully.