A Conditional Random Field Weakly Supervised Segmentation Approach for Segmenting Keratocytes Cells in Corneal Optical Coherence Tomography Images

Keratocytes are vital for maintaining the overall health of human cornea as they preserve the corneal transparency and help in healing corneal injuries. Manual segmentation of keratocytes is challenging, time consuming and also needs an expert. Here, we propose a novel semi-automatic segmentation framework, called Conditional Random FieldWeakly Supervised Segmentation (CRF-WSS) to perform the keratocytes cell segmentation. The proposed framework exploits the concept of dictionary learning in a sparse model along with the Conditional Random Field (CRF) modeling to segment keratocytes cells in Ultra High Resolution Optical Coherence Tomography (UHR-OCT) images of human cornea. The results show higher accuracy for the proposed CRF-WSS framework compare to the other tested Supervised Segmentation (SS) and Weakly Supervised Segmentation (WSS) methods.