Visual perception based automatic recognition of cell mosaics in human corneal endothelium microscopy images

Abstract

The human corneal endothelium can be observed with two types of microscopes: classical optical microscope for ex-vivo imaging, and specular optical microscope for in-vivo imaging. The quality of the cornea is correlated to the endothelial cell density and morphometry. Automatic methods to analyze the human corneal endothelium imagqs are still not totally efficient. Image analysis methods that focus only on cell contours do not give good results in presence of noise and of bad conditions of acquisition. More elaborated methods introduce regional informations in order to perform the cell contours completion, thus implementing the duality contour-region. Their good performance can be explained by their connections with several basic principles of human visual perception (Gestalt Theory and Marr's computational theory.