Fast adaptive local thresholding based on ellipse fit

In this paper we propose an adaptive thresholding method where each object is thresholded optimizing its shape. The method is based on a component tree representation, which can be computed in quasi-linear time. We test and evaluate the method on images of bacteria from three different livecell analysis experiments and show that the proposed method produces segmentation results comparable to state-of-the-art but at least an order of magnitude faster. The method can be extended to compute any feature measurements that can be calculated in a cumulative way, and holds great potential for applications where a priori information on expected object size and shape is available.