An efficient segmentation method for milk somatic cell images

Abstract

The accurate segmentation of milk somatic cells in microscope images may contribute to development of a successful system that automatically analyzes, detects and counts cells in microscope images. We present a method for milk somatic cell Segmentation. Our approach is based on segmentation of subsets of bands using mathematical morphology followed by the fusion of the resulting segmentation "channels". For color images, the band subsets are chosen as RG, RB and GB pairs. The segmentation in 2D color spaces is obtained using the watershed algorithm. These 2D segmentations are then combined to obtain a final result using a region split-and-merge process. Milk somatic cell images are segmented, and background, nucleus and cytoplasm can be extracted correctly. The most important feature of this method is the improved performance. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.