Segmentation of Overlapping Cervical Cells in Normal Pap Smear Images Using Distance-Metric and Morphological Operation

Abstract

The automatic interpretation of Pap Smear image is one of challenging issues in some aspects. Accurate segmentation for each cell is an important procedurethat must be done so that no information is lost during the evaluation process. However, the presence of overlapping cells in Pap Smear image make the automated analysis of these cytology images become more difficult. In most ofthe studies, cytoplasm segmentation is the difficult stage because the boundaries between cells are very thin. In this study, we propose an algorithm that can segment the overlapping cytoplasm. First, the morphology operation and global thresholding to segment cytoplasm is done. Second, the overlapping area on cytoplasm region is separated using morphological operation and distance criteria on each pixel. The proposed method has been evaluated against the results of manual tracing by experts. The experiment results show that the proposed method can segment the overlapping cytoplasm as similar as experts do, i.e., 2:897 3:632 (mean std) using Hausdorff distance.