Fig. 2.

Overview of the cells segmentation method. (1) Colonies segmentation. (2) Objects identification inside a colony. (3) Skeleton based object classification; (4) Complex object segmentation: 4a) Watershed algorithm application, 4b) “puzzle solving” step, 4c) new dataset generation, 4d) unsupervised Gaussian mixture modeling, 4e) final result of bacterial cells segmentation. (5) Collinear object segmentation: 5a) Application of the “deep valley" criterion to identify “bow tie” points, 5b) final result of bacterial segmentation. At step (3), there is a bifurcation leading to different processing routes based on the object's classification. See text for details