A geometric method for contour extraction of Drosophila embryos

BACKGROUND: High resolution images of Drosophila embryos in their developmental stages contain rich spatial and temporal information of gene expression. Automatic extraction of the contour of an embryo of interest in an embryonic image is a critical step of a computational system used to discover gene-gene interaction on Drosophila. RESULTS: We propose a geometric method for contour extraction of Drosophila embryos. The key of the proposed geometric method is k-dominant point extraction that is a generalization of 3-dominant point extraction proposed in our previous work. Based on k-dominant point extraction, we can approximate a connected component of edge pixels by a polygon that can be either convex or concave. The test on BDGP data shows that the proposed method outputforms two existing methods designed for contour extraction of Drosophila embryos. CONCLUSIONS: The main advantage of the proposed geometric method in the context of contour extraction of Drosophila embryos is its ability of segmenting embryos touching each other. The proposed geometric method can also be applied to applications relevant to contour extraction.