Figure 1

Flow chart of the proposed method. Detailed description of our proposed method. The results of each step are exemplified on a bright field image of hematopoietic progenitor cells. (A) The image is acquired with the focus set 18μm below the optimal focal plane to enhance contrast of cells. (B) The inhomogeneously illuminated background is corrected by a machine learning based approach to resolve differences in illumination across different locations on the cell culture plate and over time. (C) Foreground objects are identified by maximally stable extremal region (MSER) detection. (D) Splitting of clumped cells. Maxima of cells are identified by ultimate erosion and split by watershedding. Over-segmented cell bodies are reconstructed by merging of too small neighboring regions.