Interactive graph cut segmentation of touching neuronal structures from electron micrographs

Abstract

A novel interactive segmentation framework comprising of a two stage s-t mincut is proposed. The framework has been designed keeping in mind the need to segment touching neuronal structures in Electron Micrograph (EM) images. The first stage undersegments the image, and groups touching structures into a single class. The second stage accepts user interaction to separate touching structures. The technique introduces user feedback through a Markov Random Field formulation. Furthermore, a method for constructing interaction potentials using an edge response function is proposed. Encouraging results, and a comparison to state of the art methods is presented.