A K-means segmentation method for finding 2-D object areas based on 3-D image stacks obtained by confocal microscopy

A segmentation method for three-dimensional image stacks obtained by confocal microscopy is proposed. The method can be used to find two-dimensional object areas based on an image stack. The segmentation method is based on K- means clustering, global thresholding, and mathematical morphology. As a case study, the proposed method is applied to 244 image stacks of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Quantitative comparisons with manually obtained results as well as with results obtained by a two-dimensional segmentation method are used to illustrate how the additional information provided by three-dimensional image stacks can improve segmentation results.