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This paper describes a technique to segment overlapping and touching chromosomes of human metaphase cells. Automated chromosome classification has been an important pattern recognition problem for decades, numerous attempts were made in the past to characterize chromosome band patterns. But successful separation between touching and overlapping chromosomes is vital for correct classification. Since chromosomes are non-rigid objects, common methods for separation between touching chromosomes are not usable. We proposed a method using shape concave and convex information, topology analysis information, and band pale paths for segmentation of touching and overlapping chromosomes. To detect shape concave and convex information, we should first pre-segment the chromosomes and get the edge of overlapping and touching chromosomes. After filtering the original image using edge-preserving filter, we adopt the Otsu's segmentation method and extract the boundary of chromosomes. Hence the boundary can be used for segment the overlapping and touching chromosomes by detecting the concave and convex information based on boundary information. Most of the traditional boundary-based algorithms detect corners based on two steps: the first step is to acquire the smoothed version of curvature at every point along the contour, and the second step is to detect the positions where curvature maximal occur and threshold the curvature as corner points. Recently wavelet transform has been adopted into corner detection algorithms. Since the metaphase overlapping chromosomes has multi-scale corners, we adopt a multi-scale corner detection method based on Hua's method for corner detection. For touching chromosomes, it is convenient to split them using pale paths. Starting from concave corner points, a search algorithm is represented. The searching algorithm traces three pixels into the object in the direction of the normal vector in order to avoid stopping at the initial boundary until it reaches to another boundary or tracing route. For overlapping chromosomes, the searching algorithm fails. We proposed a topology information based method for analyzing overlapping and touching chromosomes. Mihail Popescu adopts Cross Section Sequence Graph (CSSG) method for shape analyzing. Gady Agam proposed Discrete Curvature Function for splitting touching and overlapping chromosomes. But due to the non-rigid property of chromosomes, it is hard to determine the actual topology structure of chromosomes. In this paper we proposed a new method to produce topology information of chromosomes and had got good results in chromosome segmentation.
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