Cell Segmentation Using Level Set Methods with a New Variance Term

Abstract

We present a new method for segmentation of phase-contrast microscopic images of cells. The algorithm is based on the variational formulation of the level set method, i.e. minimizing of a functional, which describes the level set function.

The functional is minimized by a gradient ow described by an evolutionary partial differential equation. The most significant new ideas are initialization using thresholding and the introduction of a new term based on local variance that speeds up con-vergence and achieves more accurate results.

The proposed algorithm is applied on real data and compared with another algorithm.

Keywords

• segmentation
• level set method
• active contours
• phase contrast microscopy