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An improved approach for the segmentation of starch granules in microscopic images.

Abstract：

BACKGROUND:Starches are the main storage polysaccharides in plants and are distributed widely throughout plants including seeds, roots, tubers, leaves, stems and so on. Currently, microscopic observation is one of the most important ways to investigate and analyze the structure of starches. The position, shape, and size of the starch granules are the main measurements for quantitative analysis. In order to obtain these measurements, segmentation of starch granules from the background is very important. However, automatic segmentation of starch granules is still a challenging task because of the limitation of imaging condition and the complex scenarios of overlapping granules. RESULTS:We propose a novel method to segment starch granules in microscopic images. In the proposed method, we first separate starch granules from background using automatic thresholding and then roughly segment the image using watershed algorithm. In order to reduce the oversegmentation in watershed algorithm, we use the roundness of each segment, and analyze the gradient vector field to find the critical points so as to identify oversegments. After oversegments are found, we extract the features, such as the position and intensity of the oversegments, and use fuzzy c-means clustering to merge the oversegments to the objects with similar features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can alleviate oversegmentation of watershed segmentation algorithm successfully. CONCLUSIONS:We present a new scheme for starch granules segmentation. The proposed scheme aims to alleviate the oversegmentation in watershed algorithm. We use the shape information and critical points of gradient vector flow (GVF) of starch granules to identify oversegments, and use fuzzy c-mean clustering based on prior knowledge to merge these oversegments to the objects. Experimental results on twenty microscopic starch images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

journal_name

BMC Genomics

journal_title

BMC genomics

authors

Guo S,Tang J,Deng Y,Xia Q

doi

10.1186/1471-2164-11-S2-S13

subject

Has Abstract

pub_date

2010-11-02 00:00:00

pages

S13

issn

1471-2164

pii

1471-2164-11-S2-S13

journal_volume

11 Suppl 2

pub_type

杂志文章

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An improved approach for the segmentation of starch granules in microscopic images.