A Shape Retentive Filtering Algorithm for Post-processing of Instance Contour of Cervical Cell Based on Level Set Method

A novel filtering algorithm is proposed based on level set method (LSM) and linear time Euclidean distance transform (LET) algorithm in this paper, which has the property of shape retention and thus is suitable for post-processing of the initial contours for contacting instances in digital Pap image. As one of our contributions, we propose two new metrics based on the pixel-level average false positive rate and false negative rate that used by baseline method. A significant decrease in pixel-level average false positive rate (FP) by 62% can obtain by our proposed method. The result of quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows that our proposed shape retentive filtering algorithm (SRFA) can effectively filter out the false positive fragments of the initial instance contour of cervical cells from the ISBI-2014 dataset.