Anovel multiphoton microscopy images segmentation method based onsuperpixel and watershed

Weilin Wu

Abstract:

Multiphoton microscopy (MPM) imaging technique based
on two-photon excited fluorescence (TPEF) and second
harmonic generation (SHG) shows fantastic performance
for biological imaging. The automatic segmentation of cel
lular architectural properties for biomedical diagnosis
based on MPM images is still a challenging issue. A novel
multiphoton microscopy images segmentation method
based on superpixels and watershed (MSW) is presented
here to provide good segmentation results for MPM
images. The proposed method uses SLIC superpixels in
stead of pixels to analyze MPM images for the first time.
The superpixels segmentation based on a new distance
metric combined with spatial, CIE Lab color space and
phase congruency features, divides the images into
patches which keep the details of the cell boundaries.
Then the superpixels are used to reconstruct new images
by defining an average value of superpixels as image pix
els intensity level. Finally, the marker-controlled wa
tershed is utilized to segment the cell boundaries from the
reconstructed images. Experimental results show that cel
lular boundaries can be extracted from MPM images by
MSWwithhigher accuracy and robustness.