An Efficient Approach for Cell Segmentation in Phase Contrast Microscopy Images

In this paper, we propose a new model to segment cells in phase contrast microscopy images. Cell images collected from the similar scenario share a similar background. Inspired by this, we separate cells from the background in images by formulating the problem as a low-rank and structured sparse matrix decomposition problem. Then, we propose the inverse diffraction pattern filtering method to further segment individual cells in the images. This is a deconvolution process that has a much lower computational complexity when compared to the other restoration methods. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model when it is compared with recent works.