Automatic target segmentation based on texture for microscopic images of Chinese herbal powders

The identification of Chinese herbal powders is usually based on physical or chemical detection, but that is far from enough to identity dozens of herbal species. Microscopic images of these powders contain variety of information, and important evidence for identification. These images usually contain variety of substance, and most of them are noises, which makes the target segmentation become a difficult job. An effective automatic target segmentation algorithm based on texture is proposed in this paper. Our method consists of two steps: “Preliminary Segmentation” and “Further Segmentation”. Firstly, feature vector of texture is extracted and clustered into two groups: background and foreground; secondly, taking the continuity of edge and the locality of target into consideration, energy equations are established, and Maximum flow-Minimum cut Algorithm is applied to solve them. Three groups of images are used to test our method: microscopic images of Chinese herbal powders, Brodaze Images, and natural texture images. And the experimental results show that our method achieves a better segmentation compared with Grab-Cut, and additionally user inter-action is not required in our method.