Cascaded Segmentation of Grained Cell Tissue with Active Contour Models

Cell tissue in microscope images is often grained and its intensities do not well agree with Gaussian distribution assumptions widely used in many segmentation approaches. We present a new cascaded segmentation scheme for inhomogeneous cell tissue based on active contour models. Cell regions are iteratively expanded from initial nuclei regions applying a data-dependent number of optimization levels. Experimental results on a set of microscope images from a human hepatoma cell line prove high quality of the results with regard to the cell segmentation task and biomedical investigations.