Preprocessing of electron micrographs of nucleic acid molecules for automatic analysis by computer. II. Noise removal and gap filling

Abstract

A technique is proposed for computer preprocessing of digitized electron micrographs of nucleic acid strands to facilitate their automatic segmentation and subsequent analysis. This technique, applied after high pass notch filtering the image, removes almost all spurious artifactual objects in the background. This enables the effective use of segmentation and gap filling operations that otherwise could not previously have been applied due to the combinatorics of the computations.