A segmentation method for microscope images of BY-2 tobacco cells in suspension cultures

This paper describes a segmentation method of BY-2 tobacco cells proceeded from suspension cultures. The method separates foreground objects by the detection of their boundaries and then eliminates cell clumps and artefacts based on their different inside brightness and skeleton structures. Single cell objects are restored by the thickening of binary cell residues remaining after morphological operation of cleaning the holes under the cell chain masks. Experimental results of the segmentation for a series of BY-2 images as well as cell enumeration and segmentation errors are presented.