Cellsnake: A new active contour technique for cell/fibre segmentation

Abstract

Active contours are well known for object segmentation and widely adopted in various forms for biological image analysis. Most of the techniques are commonly based on object geometry but overlapping regions cause severe problems to contour propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel active contour technique ("cellsnake") for solving this problem with an application to cell and fibre segmentation. Given that the transparency of overlapped objects is unavailable, we present a new set of contour forces derived from a-priori knowledge of cell geometry that allows the contour to deform correctly in those regions. We have combined these terms with other existing forces and we show that cellsnake gives appropriate shape estimation of the objects especially in the overlapped area in the observed images.

A Dynamic-Shape-Prior Guided Snake Model With Application in Visually Tracking Dense Cell Populations

“…The ACM in [8] takes the prior of elliptical shapes. Pan et al propose a new shape force that captures tubular patterns with particular types of cells in [9]. External forces that embed motion priors of cells are also considered in [5] and [7].…”