A State-of-the-Art Survey for Microorganism Image Segmentation Methods and Future Potential

Microorganisms play a great role in ecosystem, wastewater treatment, monitoring of environmental changes, and decomposition of waste materials. However, some of them are harmful to humans and animals such as tuberculosis bacteria and plasmodium. In such course, it is important to identify, track, analyze, consider the beneficial side and get rid of the negative effects of microorganisms using fast, accurate, and reliable methods. In recent decades, image analysis techniques have been used to address the drawbacks of manual traditional approaches in the identification and analysis of microorganisms. As image segmentation being an important step (technique) in the detection, tracking, monitoring, feature extraction, modeling, and analysis of microorganisms, different methods have been deployed, from classical approaches to current deep neural networks upon different challenges on microorganism images. This survey comprehensively analyses the various studies focused on developing microorganism image segmentation methods in the last 30 years (since 1989). In this survey, segmentation methods are categorized into classical and machine learning methods. Furthermore, these methods are subcategorized into threshold-based, region-based, and edge-based which belong to classical methods, supervised and unsupervised machine leaning-based methods which belong to machine learning category. A growth trend of different methods and most frequently used methods in each category are meticulously analyzed. A clear explanation of the suitability of these methods for different segmentation challenges encountered on microscopic microorganism images is also enlightened.