Seeking segmentation methods for this light microscope image Although I am not new to math or programming, I am a total newbie to image segmentation.  I have the following light microscope image


and I would like to segment it into cytoplasm (the magenta background) vs. the nuclei (the round-ish objects that look like cells).  I am working in MATLAB.

I was hoping someone with segmentation or image processing experience could tell me what they thought would be an efficient approach.

First, do you see any issues with this image that I ought to pre-process out?  E.g. non-uniform background illumination, noise, etc.  I am not familiar with how to identify these things visually in an image.

Secondly, there are two dominant colors in this image, corresponding to two dyes (hematoxylin and eosin, or "H&amp;E" for short).  The cytoplasm and nuclei have different colors, which in principle we know the RGB values of.  So I first tried a method of color deconvolution by Ruifrok to try to separate out the pink from the purple.

Once I did that, the cytoplasm and nuclei seem to have very different textures.  I tried a range filter and got the result below:



Do you have any suggestions for where I can go from here?  How can I eliminate the regions with cytoplasm and end up with clearly segmented nuclei?

I do not know much about graph cuts.  Do you think they would be useful?

Please let me know if I need to clarify the question.
People were approaching similar problems with methods deriving from Watersheds thresholding. Here, is a sample of Nuclei Seperation, and here is an OpenCV sample. You might try it out.