title: Watershed Merge Tree Classification for Electron Microscopy Image Segmentation.
abstract: 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 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.
authors.affiliation: Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah.
authors.forename: Ting
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, University of California, San Diego.
authors.forename: Elizabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Jurrus
authors.forename: Mojtaba
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Seyedhosseini
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ellisman
authors.forename: Tolga
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tasdizen