Cell Segmentation in Phase Contrast Microscopy by Constrained Optimization

Utilization of automatic cell segmentation process is difficult to identify in a cell due to halo and shade-off distortions when observing the phase contrast microscopy images. Therefore, it is an important step to restore artifact-free images made ready for segmentation process. The main focus of this paper is to define a gradient projection algorithm to restore images based on the minimization problem of quadratic objective function with non-negative constraints. The proposed algorithm converges to a global minimum solution independent on initialization. The experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm can restore artifact-free images, which could produce high quality segmentation results using a simple thresholding method.