An efficient image segmentation method with application to cell images

This paper focuses on a concrete image segmentation application, which aims at extracting cell regions from cell images taken by the video camera on an auto microscope platform. The segmented results are further used for cancer diagnosis. The application requires that the segmentation method has the ability to fast and accurately extract cell regions from high resolution images. The proposed method is a combination of auto-thresholding method, watershed and morphological method. Furthermore, a novel gradient operator is proposed to improve the accuracy of edge locating. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is robust and efficient. Moreover, for any images with homogeneous background distribution, the proposed method is well applicable.