Identification of cell nucleus using a Mumford-shah ellipse detector

Abstract

Detection of cell nucleus is critical in microscopy image analysis and ellipse detection plays an important role because most nuclei are elliptical in shapes. We developed an ellipse detection algorithm based on the Mumford-Shah model that inherits its superior properties. In our ellipse detector, the active contours in the Mumford-Shah model are constrained to be non-overlapping ellipses. A quantitative comparison with the randomized Hough transform shows that the Mumford-Shah based approach detects nucleus significantly better on our data sets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.