Overlapped Cell Image Segmentation Based on Distance Transform

Abstract

In micro cell images, several cells overlapped with each other often appears which causes difficulty to automatic cell estimation. How to separate overlapped cells to individual cells becomes the prerequisite of analyzing the micro cell images. In this paper, by introducing the theory of distance transform combining with watershed algorithm, a new algorithm of overlapped cell segmentation is proposed. This algorithm adopts distance transform to turn the position information of pixels to grey level information, and then adopts the watershed algorithm to realize the search and segmentation of the adhesion border of cell. The main characteristic of this method is that it can reduce the requisition of the quality of image, such as grey difference or noise level and so on. At the same time, it can calculate fast with high accuracy and steady result. So it is suitable for most overlapped cell images segmentation.