We investigate the discriminant power of two local and two global texture measures on virus images. The viruses are imaged using negative stain transmission electron microscopy. Local binary patterns and a multi scale extension are compared to radial density profiles in the spatial domain and in the Fourier domain. To assess the discriminant potential of the texture measures a Random Forest classifier is used. Our analysis shows that the multi scale extension performs better than the standard local binary patterns and that radial density profiles in comparison is a rather poor virus texture discriminating measure. Furthermore, we show that the multi scale extension and the profiles in Fourier domain are both good texture measures and that they complement each other well, that is, they seem to detect different texture properties. Combining the two, hence, improves the discrimination between virus textures.
Summary
In this paper, we present an automatic segmentation method that detects virus particles of various shapes in transmission electron microscopy images. The method is based on a statistical analysis of local neighbourhoods of all the pixels in the image followed by an object width discrimination and finally, for elongated objects, a border refinement step. It requires only one input parameter, the approximate width of the virus particles searched for. The proposed method is evaluated on a large number of viruses. It successfully segments viruses regardless of shape, from polyhedral to highly pleomorphic.
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