Copyright © 2012 Chunyan Yao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel region-based method for extracting useful information from microscopic images under complex conditions. It is especially used for blood cell segmentation and statistical analysis. The active model detects several inner and outer contours of an object from its background. The method incorporates a local binary fitting model into a maximum regional difference model. It utilizes both local and global intensity information as the driving forces of the contour model on the principle of the largest regional difference. The local and global fitting forces ensure that local dissimilarities can be captured and globally different areas can be segmented, respectively. By combining the advantages of local and global information, the motion of the contour is driven by the mixed fitting force, which is composed of the local and global fitting term in the energy function. Experiments are carried out in the laboratory, and results show that the novel model can yield good performances for microscopic image analysis.