Recursive water flow: A shape decomposition approach for cell clump splitting

We propose a hierarchical method for splitting cell clumps into individual cells which we call Recursive Water Flow (rwf). For the segmentation of cells in histological images we first apply foreground segmentation leading to connected regions of clumping cells. rwf defines one-dimensional cost-functions along paths on the skeleton of these regions. In particular, we collect split-relevant information along geodesic paths between skeleton end-points. This framework allows to exploit combined shape and intensity information for identifying optimal split positions and recursively decomposing the clumps into single distinct cells. Results show that our framework helps to improve cell segmentation performance in contrast to splitting based on local geometrical clues.