Algorithm for splitting touching objects based on contour segments

Splitting touching objects in digital images is a special issue in image segmentation. Bai et al. introduced concave points and an ellipse-fitting-based algorithm, which used the relationship between the corresponding fitted ellipses of contour segments to combine them, which causes some problems. This splitting algorithm is improved to make use of the relationship between contour segments to merge them. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm is more accurate than the previous one.