Early screening for cervical cancer is a common form of cancer prevention. In the microscopic images of cervical cells, the number of abnormal cells is small, and some abnormal cells are heavily stacked. How to solve the segmentation of highly overlapping cells and realize the identification of single cells from overlapping cells is still a heavy task. Therefore, this paper proposes an object detection algorithm of Cell_yolo to effectively and accurately segment overlapping cells. Cell_yolo adopts a simplified network structure and improves the maximum pooling operation, so that the information of the image is preserved to the greatest extent during the model pooling process. Aiming at the characteristics of many overlapping cells in cervical cell images, a non-maximum suppression method of center distance is proposed to prevent the overlapping cell detection frame from being deleted by mistake. At the same time, the loss function is improved and the focus loss function is added to alleviate the imbalance of positive and negative samples in the training process. Experiments are conducted on a private dataset (BJTUCELL). Experiments have verified that the Cell_yolo model has the advantages of low computational complexity and high detection accuracy, and it is superior to common network models such as YOLOv4 and Faster_RCNN.
Keywords: cervical cells; deep learning; object detection; overlapping cell; yolo.