matlab: remove small edges and simplify an histology image

Question

I have an image like this:

What I want to do is to find the outer edge of this cell and the inner edge in the cell between the two parts of different colors.

But this image contains to much detail I think, and is there any way to simplify this image, remove those small edges and find the edges I want?

I have tried the edge function provided by matlab. But it can only find the outer edge and disturbed by those detailed edges.

Answer 1

This is a very challenging work due to the ambiguous boundaries and tiny difference between red and green intensities. If you want to implement the segmentation very precisely and meet some medical requirements, Shai's k-means plus graph cuts may be one of the very few options (EM algorithm may be an alternative). If you have a large database that has many similar images, some machine learning methods might help. Otherwise, I just wrote a very simple code to roughly extract the internal red region for you. The boundary is not that accurate since some of the green regions are also included.

I1=I;
I=rgb2hsv(I);
I=I(:,:,1); % the channel with relatively large margin between green and red

I=I.*(I<0.25);
I=imdilate(I, true(5));
% I=imfill(I,'holes'); depends on what is your definition of the inner boundary
bw=bwconncomp(I);
ar=bw.PixelIdxList;

% find the largest labeled area,
n=0;
for i=1:length(ar)
    if length(ar{i})>n
        n=length(ar{i});
        num=i;
    end
end
bw1=bwlabel(I);
bwfinal(:,:,1)=(bw1==num).*double(I1(:,:,1));
bwfinal(:,:,2)=(bw1==num).*double(I1(:,:,2));
bwfinal(:,:,3)=(bw1==num).*double(I1(:,:,3));
bwfinal=uint8(bwfinal);
imshow(bwfinal)

Answer 2

It seems to me you have three dominant colors in the image:
1. blue-ish background (but also present inside cell as "noise")
2. grenn-ish one part of cell
3. red-ish - second part of cell
If these three colors are distinct enough, you may try and segment the image using k-means and Graph cuts.

First stage - use k-means to associate each pixels with one of three dominant colors. Apply k-means to the colors of the image (each pixel is a 3-vector in your chosen color space). Run k-means with k=3, keep for each pixel its distance to centroids.

Second stage - separate cell from background. Do a binary segmentation using graph-cut. The data cost for each pixel is either the distance to the background color (if pixel is labeled "background"), or the minimal distance to the other two colors (if pixel is labeled "foreground"). Use image contrast to set the pair-wise weights for the smoothness term.

Third stage - separate the two parts of the cell. Again do a binary segmentation using graph-cut but this time work only on pixels marked as "cell" in the previous stage. The data term for pixels that the k-means assigned to background but are labeled as cell should be zero for all labels (these are the "noise" pixels inside the cell).

You may find my matlab wrapper for graph-cuts useful for this task.