Dual Dictionary Learning for Cell Segmentation in Bright-field Microscopy Images

Cell segmentation is an important but time-consuming and laborious task in biological image analysis. An automated, robust, and fast method is required to overcome such burdensome processes. These needs are, however, challenging due to various cell shapes, intensity, and incomplete boundaries. A precise cell segmentation will allow to making a pathological diagnosis of tissue samples. A vast body of literature exists on cell segmentation in microscopy images [1]. The majority of existing work is based on input images and predefined feature models only – for example, using a deformable model to extract edge boundaries in the image. Only a handful of recent methods employ data-driven approaches, such as supervised learning. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven cell segmentation algorithm for bright-field microscopy images. The proposed method minimizes an energy formula defined by two dictionaries – one is for input images and the other is for their manual segmentation results – and a common sparse code, which aims to find the pixel-level classification by deploying the learned dictionaries on new images. In contrast to deformable models, we do not need to know a prior knowledge of objects. We also employed convolutional sparse coding and Alternating Direction of Multiplier Method (ADMM) for fast dictionary learning and energy minimization. Unlike an existing method [1], our method trains both dictionaries concurrently, and is implemented using the GPU device for faster performance. : ,,,