Curvelet initialized level set cell segmentation for touching cells in low contrast images

Cell segmentation is an important element of automatic cell analysis. This paper proposes a method to extract the cell nuclei and the cell boundaries of touching cells in low contrast images. First, the contrast of the low contrast cell images is improved by a combination of multiscale top hat filter and h-maxima. Then, a curvelet initialized level set method has been proposed to detect the cell nuclei and the boundaries. The image enhancement results have been verified using PSNR (Peak Signal to noise ratio) and the segmentation results have been verified using accuracy, sensitivity and precision metrics. The results show improved values of the performance metrics with the proposed method.