Segmentation Subject to Stitching Constraints: Finding Many Small Structures in a Large Image

Extracting numerous cells in a large microscopic image is often required in medical research. The challenge is to reduce the segmentation complexity on a large image without losing the fine segmentation granularity of small structures. We propose a constrained spectral graph partitioning approach where the segmentation of the entire image is obtained from a set of patch segmentations, independently derived but subject to stitching constraints between neighboring patches. The constraints come from mutual agreement analysis on patch segmentations from a previous round. Our experimental results demonstrate that the constrained segmentation not only stitches solutions seamlessly along overlapping patch borders but also refines the segmentation in the patch interiors.