Intelligent splitting in the chromosome domain

摘要

In this paper, the general problem of finding plausible lines of separation between touching groups of dark objects is investigated. The particular problem domain considered is that of chromosome analysis, in which the segmentation problem cannot be dealt with by thresholding alone. Other methods reported in the literature which use heuristic search, fuzzy set theory, or region growing, have not tackled the segmentation problem adequately. It is shown that the problem can be largely solved for the chromosome domain by a robust, adaptive procedure based on an analysis of concavities in relation to expected chromosome shape, and on a search for minimum density paths. On a test set of 1023 individual clusters of touching chromosomes a 95% success rate was achieved.