Watershed Merge Tree Classification for Electron Microscopy Image Segmentation

Conference · Sun Nov 11 04:00:00 EST 2012

OSTI ID:1111240

Liu, TIng; Jurrus, Elizabeth R.; Seyedhosseini, Mojtaba; Ellisman, Mark; Tasdizen, Tolga

Automated segmentation of electron microscopy (EM) images is a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a novel method that utilizes a hierarchical structure and boundary classification for 2D neuron segmentation. With a membrane detection probability map, a watershed merge tree is built for the representation of hierarchical region merging from the watershed algorithm. A boundary classifier is learned with non-local image features to predict each potential merge in the tree, upon which merge decisions are made with consistency constraints in the sense of optimization to acquire the final segmentation. Independent of classifiers and decision strategies, our approach proposes a general framework for efficient hierarchical segmentation with statistical learning. We demonstrate that our method leads to a substantial improvement in segmentation accuracy.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1111240
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-88717; WN0219080
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English