Bayesian morphological peak estimation and its application to chromosome counting via fluorescence in situ hybridization

The morphological top-hat transform is often used to locate bright peaks in a gray-scale image. The method can be problematic when there are two classes of peaks, one corresponding to valid objects and the other to noise (or crud). The present paper employs Bayesian estimation in conjunction with a multinomial distribution corresponding to levels of peak heights in the top-hat image to arrive at an optimal conditional-expectation estimator of the number of valid peaks. The estimation method is applied to count chromosomes in images resulting from a biotechnological technique called FISH (fluorescence in situ hybridization). Copyrigh