Nuclei segmentation of histology images based on deep learning and color quantization and analysis of real world pill images

Medical image analysis has paved a way for research in the field of medical and biological image analysis through the applications of image processing. This study has special emphasis on nuclei segmentation from digitized histology images and pill segmentation. Cervical cancer is one of the most common malignant cancers affecting women. This can be cured if detected early. Histology image feature analysis is required to classify the squamous epithelium into Normal, CIN1, CIN2 and CIN3 grades of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN). The nuclei in the epithelium region provide the majority of information regarding the severity of the cancer. Segmentation of nuclei is therefore crucial. This paper provides two methods for nuclei segmentation. The first approach is clustering approach by quantization of the color content in the histology images uses k-means++ clustering. The second approach is deep-learning based nuclei segmentation method works by gathering localized information through the generation of superpixels and training convolutional neural network. The other part of the study covers segmentation of consumer-quality pill images. Misidentified and unidentified pills constitute a safety hazard for both patients and health professionals. An automatic pill identification technique is essential to address this challenge. This paper concentrates on segmenting the pill image, which is crucial step to identify a pill. A color image segmentation algorithm is proposed by generating superpixels using the Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) algorithm and merging the superpixels by thresholding the region adjacency graphs. The algorithm manages to supersede the challenges due to various backgrounds and lighting conditions of consumer-quality pill images --Abstract, page iii

Automatic Feature Set Selection for Merging Image Segmentation Results Using Fuzzy Clustering

The image segmentation performance of clustering algorithms is highly dependent on the features used and the type of objects contained in the image, which limits the generalization ability of such algorithms. As a consequence, a fuzzy image segmentation using suppressed fuzzy c-means clustering (FSSC) algorithm was proposed that merged the initially segmented regions produced by a fuzzy clustering algorithm, using two different feature sets each comprising two features from pixel location, pixel intensity and a combination of both, which considered objects with similar surface variations (SSV), the arbitrariness of fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm using pixel location and the connectedness property of objects. The feature set selection for the initial segmentation in the merging technique was however, inaccurate because it did not consider all possible feature set combinations and also manually defined the threshold used to identify objects having SSV. To overcome these limitations, a new automatic feature set selection for merging image segmentation results using fuzzy clustering (AFMSF) algorithm is proposed, which considers the best feature set selection and also calculates the threshold based upon human visual perception. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis prove the superiority of AFMSF algorithm compared with other clustering techniques including FSSC, FCM, possibilistic c-means (PCM) and SFCM, for different image types