Gradient direction edge enhancement based nucleus and cytoplasm contour detector of cervical smear images

Abstract

This paper presents a gradient direction edge enhancement based contour (GDEEBC) detector to segment the nucleus and cytoplasm from each cervical smear image. In order to eliminate noise from the image, this paper proposes a trim-meaning filter that can effectively remove impulse and Gaussian noise but still preserve the edge sharpness of an object. In addition, a bi-group enhancer is proposed to make a clear-cut separation for the pixels lying between two objects. Finally, a gradient direction (GD) enhancer is presented to suppress the gradients of noise and to brighten the gradients of object contours as well. The experimental results show that all the techniques proposed above have impressive performances. In addition to cervical smear images, these proposed techniques can also be utilized in object segmentation of other types of images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.