Abstract:  Image segmentation algorithm based on template matching has good generality in the microscopic cell image segmentation. In view of the traditional template matching microscopic cell image segmentation algorithm in producing template set produced more redundant templates, which led to a rather long time of image segmentation, an improved template matching microscopic cell image segmentation algorithm was proposed. This algorithm extracted shape feature and calculated similarity of template set on the basis of the traditional template matching algorithm. Then, this algorithm eliminated the more similar templates to reduce template set in the case of least affecting the accuracy of image segmentation. Finally, the reduced template set was used to complete the segmentation. The experiments on U2OS and NIH3T3 image sets show that the improved algorithm is comparable with traditional algorithm in accuracy, and has faster speed and better performance compared with traditional algorithm in image segmentation.

Key words: cell image segmentation, template matching, reduced template sets, shape feature extraction