Employing temporal information for cell segmentation using max-flow/min-cut in phase-contrast video microscopy

Cell segmentation is a crucial step in many biomedical image analysis applications and it can be considered as an important part of a tracking system. Segmentation in phase-contrast images is a challenging task since in this imaging technique, the background intensity is approximately similar to the cell pixel intensity. In this paper we propose an interactive automatic pixel level segmentation algorithm, that uses temporal information to improve the segmentation result. This algorithm is based on the max-flow/min-cut algorithm and can be solved in polynomial time. This method is not restricted to any specific cell shape and segments cells of various shapes and sizes. The results of the proposed algorithm show that using the temporal information does improve segmentation considerably.