BACKGROUND SEGMENTATION IN MICROSCOPY IMAGES
J. J. Charles, L. I. Kuncheva, B. Wells · 2008
In many applications it is necessary to segment the foreground of an image from the background. However images from microscope slides illuminated using transmitted light have uneven background light levels. The non-uniform illumination makes segmentation difficult. We propose to fit a set of parabolas in order to segment the image into background and foreground. Parabolas are fitted separately on horizontal and vertical stripes of the grey level intensity image. A pixel is labelled as background or foreground based on the two corresponding parabolas. The proposed method outperforms the following four standard segmentation techniques, (1) thresholding determined manually or by fitting a mixture of Gaussians, (2) clustering in the RGB space, (3) fitting a two-argument quadratic function on the whole image and (4) using the morphological closure method.