Band-pass filter design by segmentation in frequency domain for detection of epithelial cells in endomicroscope images

Abstract

Voice hoarseness can have various reasons, one of them is a change of the vocal fold mucus. This change can be examined with micro endoscopes. Cell detection in these images is a difficult task, due to bad image quality, caused by noise and illumination variations. In previous works, it was observed that the repetitive pattern of the cell walls cause an elliptical shape in the Fourier domain [1, 2]. A manual segmentation and back transformation of this shape results in filtered images, where the cell detection is much easier [3]. The goal of this work is to automatically segment the elliptical shape in Fourier domain. Two different approaches are developed to get a suitable band-pass filter: a thresholding and an active contour method. After the band-pass filter is applied, the achieved results are superior to the manual segmentation case.