Robust and automatic cell detection and segmentation from microscopic images of non‐setae phytoplankton species

Abstract

Saliency-based marker-controlled watershed method was proposed to detect and segment phytoplankton cells from microscopic images of non-setae species. This method first improved IG saliency detection method by combining saturation feature with colour and luminance feature to detect cells from microscopic images uniformly and then produced effective internal and external markers by removing various specific noises in microscopic images for efficient performance of watershed segmentation automatically. The authors built the first benchmark dataset for cell detection and segmentation, including 240 microscopic images across multiple phytoplankton species with pixel-wise cell regions labelled by a taxonomist, to evaluate their method. They compared their cell detection method with seven popular saliency detection methods and their cell segmentation method with six commonly used segmentation methods. The quantitative comparison validates that their method performs better on cell detection in terms of robustness and uniformity and cell segmentation in terms of accuracy and completeness. The qualitative results show that their improved saliency detection method can detect and highlight all cells, and the following marker selection scheme can remove the corner noise caused by illumination, the small noise caused by specks, and debris, as well as deal with blurred edges.