An Improved Touching-Cell Splitting Algorithm Based on Bottleneck Detection

In terms of the phenomenon that red cells and white cells incline to touch each other in urinary sediment images, an improved touching-cell splitting algorithm is proposed in the paper that is based on the bottleneck detection The proposed algorithm is featured by positioning the bottleneck points by the rule of bottleneck, also featured by determining to split a region or not by the criteria of segmentation conditions. Once a splitting is done, the algorithm turn to apply the bottleneck detection again to those regions that are already been segmented. Simulation and experiment show that the performance of the improved algorithm is accurate and stable in splitting ranging from two touched cells to multiple touched circumstances; the enhanced robustness and universality can be enough to prove the practicability of the algorithm a certain level.