Morphological detection based on size and contrast criteria application to cells detection

This paper deals with a detection algorithm relying on size and contrast criteria. It is suitable for a large range of applications where a priori information about the size and the contrast of the objects to detect is available. The detection is performed in three separate steps: the first one is a preprocessing which removes unuseful information with a size criterion. The second one performs a feature extraction based on contrast. Finally, the last step is the decision itself. All these steps make use of morphological transformations because of their ability to deal with the criteria of interest and of their low computational cost. As an example, this algorithm is applied to the automatic detection of spermatozoa.