Electron Microscopy (EM) image (or volume) segmentation has become significantly important in recent years as an instrument for connectomics. This paper proposes a novel agglomerative framework for EM segmentation. In particular, given an over-segmented image or volume, we propose a novel framework for accurately clustering regions of the same neuron. Unlike existing agglomerative methods, the proposed context-aware algorithm divides superpixels (over-segmented regions) of different biological entities into different subsets and agglomerates them separately. In addition, this paper describes a "delayed" scheme for agglomerative clustering that postpones some of the merge decisions, pertaining to newly formed bodies, in order to generate a more confident boundary prediction. We report significant improvements attained by the proposed approach in segmentation accuracy over existing standard methods on 2D and 3D datasets.
@article{arxiv.1406.1476,
title = {A Context-aware Delayed Agglomeration Framework for Electron Microscopy Segmentation},
author = {Toufiq Parag and Anirban Chakraborty and Stephen Plaza and Lou Scheffer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.1476},
year = {2015}
}