Table 3 Summary usage statistics of segmentation methods in the surveyed literature

Active contours + Level Set

Parametric curves which fit to an image object of interest. These curve fitting functions are regularized gradient edge detectors

24

Graph-based

Applies graph theories to segment regions of interest

2

Morphological

Apply morphological operations to segment or clean a pre-segmented image

2

Other

The methods in this category are created for a specific problem or cell line by a combination of existing techniques or by creating a new concept

8

Partial Derivative Equations

Groups pixels into different segment based on minimizing a cost function using partial derivatives

2

Region growing

Starts from a seed and grows the segmented regions following some pre-defined criterion

2

Thresholding

Threshold based techniques consider the foreground pixels to have intensity values higher (or lower) than a given threshold.

31

Watershed

Mainly used to separate touching cells or touching subcellular regions

15