Patent Document ID: 20070219769
Application ID: 11570341
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for segmenting a digital image of biological cells, comprising the steps: determining a maximum gradient for each pixel of the image as the maximum difference between a pixel value of the pixel and the respective pixel values of all or selected neighboring pixels, determining a segmentation threshold value using the frequencies of the maximum gradients, comprising the steps a) assigning a gradient frequency to all maximum gradients as the number of pixels having the respective maximum gradient, b) determining the value of an environment variable as the number of pixels for which the most frequent maximum gradient was determined, c) iteratively comparing the value of the environment variable and a predefined estimate for the number of pixels depicting the environment of a biological cell, and adding the number of pixels having the next most frequent maximum gradient to the value of the environment variable until the value of the environment variable exceeds or reaches the estimated value, and d) determining the segmentation threshold value from the number of repetitions of step c), classifying the pixels into an object class and an environment class using the segmentation threshold value, those pixels whose maximum gradient is equal to or greater than the segmentation threshold value being allocated to the object class, and the other pixels being allocated to the environment class, and forming a segmentation zone of the digital image using a class merging method, in particular a region growing method.