This paper presents an edge enhancement nucleus and cytoplast contour (EENCC) detector to enable cutting the nucleus and cytoplast from a cervical smear cell image. To clean up noises from an image, this paper proposes a trim-meaning filter that can effectively remove impulse and Gaussian noises but still preserves the sharpness of object boundaries. In addition, a bigroup enhancer is proposed to make a clear-cut separation of the pixels lying in-between two objects. A mean vector difference enhancer is presented to suppress the gradients of noises and also to brighten the gradients of object contours. What is more, a relative-distance-error measure is put forward to evaluate the segmentation error between the extracted and target object contours. The experimental results show that all the aforementioned techniques proposed have performed impressively. Other than for cervical smear images, these proposed techniques can also be utilized in object segmentation of other images.

Cytologic screening has been widely used for detecting the cervical cancers. In this study, a semiautomatic PC-based cellular image analysis system was developed for segmenting nuclear and cytoplasmic contours and for computing morphometric and textual features to train support vector machine (SVM) classifiers to classify four different types of cells and to discriminate dysplastic from normal cells. A software program incorporating function, including image reviewing and standardized denomination of file names, was also designed to facilitate and standardize the workflow of cell analyses. Two experiments were conducted to verify the classification performance. The cross-validation results of the first experiment showed that average accuracies of 97.16% and 98.83%, respectively, for differentiating four different types of cells and in discriminating dysplastic from normal cells have been achieved using salient features (8 for four-cluster and 7 for two-cluster classifiers) selected with SVM recursive feature addition. In the second experiment, 70% (837) of the cell images were used for training and 30% (361) for testing, achieving an accuracy of 96.12% and 98.61% for four-cluster and two-cluster classifiers, respectively. The proposed system provides a feasible and effective tool in evaluating cytologic specimens.