Segmentation of overlapping cervical nuclei based on the identification

Image segmentation directly determines the performance of automatic screening technique. However, there are overlapping nuclei in nuclei images. It raises a challenge to nuclei segmentation. To solve the problem, a segmentation method of overlapping cervical nuclei based on the identification is proposed. This method consists of three stages: classifier training, recognition and fine segmentation. In the classifier training, feature selection and classifier selection are used to obtain a classifier with high recognition rate. In the recognition, the outputs of the rough segmentation are classified and processed according to their labels. In the fine segmentation, the severely overlapping nuclei are further segmented based on the prior knowledge provided by the recognition. Experiments show that this method can accurately segment overlapping nuclei.