Splitting touching cells based on concave points and ellipse fitting

• Published in: Pattern recognition Vol. 42; no. 11; pp. 2434 - 2446
• Main Authors: Bai, Xiangzhi, Sun, Changming, Zhou, Fugen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.11.2009; Elsevier
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Concave point; Contour; Ellipse fitting; Exact sciences and technology; Information, signal and communications theory; Signal and communications theory; Signal representation. Spectral analysis; Signal, noise; Telecommunications and information theory; Touching cells splitting; Concave point; Contour; Ellipse fitting; Touching cells splitting; Image analysis; Contour analysis; Elliptic curve; Curve fitting; Algorithm
• ISSN: 0031-3203; 1873-5142
• DOI: 10.1016/j.patcog.2009.04.003

A new touching cells splitting algorithm based on concave points and ellipse fitting is proposed in this paper. The algorithm includes two parts: contour pre-processing and ellipse processing. The purpose of contour pre-processing is to smooth fluctuations of the contour, find concave points of the contour and divide the contour into different segments via the concave points. The purpose of ellipse processing is to process the different segments of the contour into possible single cells by using the properties of the fitted ellipses. Because concave points divide the whole contour of touching cells into different segments and different segments of one single cell have similar properties, the ellipse processing can separate the touching cells through ellipse fitting. This paper demonstrates a new way of using ellipse fitting to split the binary contour of touching cells. Experimental results show that our algorithm is efficient.