Fast detection of chromosome metaphases in digitalized microscopic slides

Several algorithms and methods exist for object detection and recognition, but in the case of extremely large images most of these algorithms can not be used in a time efficient way. The detection of objects on scanned microscopic slides is a challenging problem due to the large size of the magnified slide scans. In this paper a two pass algorithm is presented for the detection of chromosome metaphases on scanned microscopic slides. In the first pass a fast estimation is given for the locations of metaphases on coarse resolution and in the second pass these locations are extracted in finer resolution and a fast component analysis is applied to affirm or reject the existence of a metaphase at the location.