Overlapping cells separation method for cervical cell images

Image analysis is one of the common application fields in medical especially in cytology. Visual interpretation is the core for most medical diagnostic procedure. This process is tedious especially in the existence of overlapping cells therefore it is crucial to split the overlapping cells into single ones. This study proposes an overlapping cells separation method for separating the overlapping cells. The proposed technique integrates Edge Detection process and Pseudo-Color technique, with Color Space Extraction employed at preprocessing stage. First, the color space concept is applied to extract the original image of Pap smear into red plane, green plane and blue plane. Then the Seed Based Region Growing technique is applied to find boundaries of the cells. Pseudo-color technique is then embedded to the demarcated region to determine each part of the cell; nucleus, cytoplasm and background. The proposed technique is capable to distinguish each cervical cell from overlapping cervical cells image. Therefore, the resultant image will be more useful for further analysis.