A new approach for touching cells segmentation

Automatic cell segmentation has various applications in different parts of science. The development of automated methods for cell segmentation, remains challenging in situations where there are touching cells. In this paper we propose a new method for separating touching cells. As the first step, we use a combination of graph segmentation algorithm and thresholding for segmenting foreground objects and producing a binary image. Next, boundary points of separation zone are selected by using a corner detection algorithm. Finally, the marker controller watershed transform is applied to separate touching cells at selected points.