Crowd Sourcing Image Segmentation with iaSTAPLE
This provides a tool for efficiently crowdsourcing image segmentation in biological microscopy, though it is incremental as it builds on the established STAPLE method.
The paper tackles the problem of obtaining accurate epithelial cell segmentations from non-expert crowd workers by proposing iaSTAPLE, a novel label fusion technique that integrates an image segmentation model into the STAPLE approach. The result shows that iaSTAPLE outperforms STAPLE in segmentation accuracy and worker performance estimation, correctly segmenting 99% of cells compared to expert segmentations on a dataset of over 5000 fly wing epithelial cells.
We propose a novel label fusion technique as well as a crowdsourcing protocol to efficiently obtain accurate epithelial cell segmentations from non-expert crowd workers. Our label fusion technique simultaneously estimates the true segmentation, the performance levels of individual crowd workers, and an image segmentation model in the form of a pairwise Markov random field. We term our approach image-aware STAPLE (iaSTAPLE) since our image segmentation model seamlessly integrates into the well-known and widely used STAPLE approach. In an evaluation on a light microscopy dataset containing more than 5000 membrane labeled epithelial cells of a fly wing, we show that iaSTAPLE outperforms STAPLE in terms of segmentation accuracy as well as in terms of the accuracy of estimated crowd worker performance levels, and is able to correctly segment 99% of all cells when compared to expert segmentations. These results show that iaSTAPLE is a highly useful tool for crowd sourcing image segmentation.