Segmentation of organs in pig offal using auto-context

The segmentation of 2D images of 3D non-rigid objects into their constituent parts can pose challenging problems, such as missing and occluded parts, weak constraints over the spatial arrangement of parts, and variance in form and appearance. These problems have been addressed via segmentation methods that incorporate spatial context information, such as the auto-context technique. In this paper, we address for the first time the problem of segmenting multiple organs in images of pig offal, a challenging image analysis task that constitutes an essential step towards automated screening at abattoir for signs of sub-clinical diseases. We applied auto-context segmentation to a large data set of images and explored the effect of complementing conventional context features with integral features suited to our application.