Detecting Ellipses in Embryo Images Using Arc Detection Method with Particle Swarm for Blastomere-Quality Measurement System

The objective of this paper is to present a novel method, based on a swarm intelligence algorithm, for ellipse detection in digital images of embryo. The process is carried out in several stages. First, edge detection is performed on the image. Then, line segments in the image are detected, and potential elliptical arc segments are extracted from the line segments. Afterward, the detection process is carried out using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method, which utilize the calculation of the fitness function from the arc segment previously detected. The PSO technique, which is the idea behind the proposed algorithm, is used to find the actual ellipses by combining potential elliptical arcs. The best combination of potential arcs is determined by means a voting technique that utilizes three important points on the arc, namely the starting point, midpoint, and endpoint, so the voting is more efficient than doing the voting for every single pixel in the image. Furthermore, this method is used an embryo image that has following the characteristics: multiple ellipses, a lot of noise, an incomplete ellipse, low image contrast, and overlapping cells. Experiment show that the proposed method detects the ellipses better than do several voting-based ellipse detection methods such as RHT, IRHT, and PSORHT. On the other hand, the experiments show that the proposed method has a higher average hit rate than do other methods. This research is used to increase the success rate of In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF).