A new plant cell image segmentation algorithm

Abstract

A new plant cell image segmentation algorithm is presented in this paper. It is based on the morphological analysis of the cell shapes and on gradient information. The difficulty of the segmentation of plant cells lies in the complex shapes of the cells and their overlapping, often present due to recent cellular division. The algorithm presented tries to imitate the human procedure for segmenting overlapping and touching particles. It analyzes concavities in the shape of a group of cells as well as the existence of a coherent surface for the segmentation. The algorithm can be divided in two main parts, firstly a simple method for finding dominant concave points in shapes is introduced and secondly several parameters between concave points are calculated as a criterion for segmentation. It has been also shown that the algorithm produces good results when the output is applied as a marker for the morphological watershed algorithm. Results will be presented in real images of a cell suspension culture to show the validity of the chosen approach.