Touching cells splitting by using concave points and ellipse fitting

A novel touching cells splitting algorithm by using concave points and ellipse fitting is proposed to split circle-like or ellipse-like touching cells in this paper. The algorithm is divided into two parts. The first part is contour pre-processing, whose purpose is to find the concave points of the contour and separate the contour into different segments using the concave points. The second part is ellipse processing, whose purpose is to process the different segments of the contour as a possible single cell by using the properties of the fitted ellipse. The second part is the main contribution of this paper which demonstrates a new way to use ellipse fitting to split the binary contour of the touching cells. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient.