Self-initialized active contours for microscopic cell image segmentation

Level set models are suitable for processing topological changes in different regions of images while performing segmentation. Active contour models require an empirical setting for initial parameters, which is tedious for the end-user. This study proposes an incremental level set model with the automatic initialization of contours based on local and global fitting energies that enable it to capture image regions containing intensity corruption or other light artifacts. The region-based area and the region-based length terms use signed pressure force (SPF) to strengthen the balloon force. SPF helps to achieve a smooth version of the gradient descent flow in terms of energy minimization. The proposed model is tested on multiple synthetic and real images. Our model has four advantages: first, there is no need for the end user to initialize the parameters; instead, the model is self-initialized. Second, it is more accurate than other methods. Third, it shows lower computational complexity. Fourth, it does not depend on the starting position of the contour. Finally, we evaluated the performance of our model on microscopic cell images (Coelho et al., in: 2009 IEEE international symposium on biomedical imaging: from nano to macro, IEEE, 2009) to confirm that its performance is superior to that of other state-of-the-art models.