You Should Use Regression to Detect Cells

Automated cell detection in histopathology images is a hard problem due to the large variance of cell shape and appearance. We show that cells can be detected reliably in images by predicting, for each pixel location, a monotonous function of the distance to the center of the closest cell. Cell centers can then be identified by extracting local extremums of the predicted values. This approach results in a very simple method, which is easy to implement. We show on two challenging microscopy image datasets that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, reliability, and speed. We also introduce a new dataset that we will make publicly available.