Automatic cytoplasm and nuclei segmentation for color cervical smear image using an efficient gap-search MRF

Abstract

Accurate and effective cervical smear image segmentation is required for automated cervical cell analysis systems. Thus, we proposed a novel superpixel-based Markov random field (MRF) segmentation framework to acquire the nucleus, cytoplasm and image background of cell images. We seek to classify color non-overlapping superpixel-patches on one image for image segmentation. This model describes the whole image as an undirected probabilistic graphical model and was developed using an automatic label-map mechanism for determining nuclear, cytoplasmic and background regions. A gap-search algorithm was designed to enhance the model efficiency. Data show that the algorithms of our framework provide better accuracy for both real-world and the public Herlev datasets. Furthermore, the proposed gap-search algorithm of this model is much more faster than pixel-based and superpixel-based algorithms.

Keywords: Cervical smear image segmentation; Faster MRF; MRF modeling and inference; Papanicolaou test; Superpixel feature extraction and selection; Superpixel-based MRF.