Tiled Top-Down Pyramids and Segmentation of Large Histological Images

Recent microscopic imaging systems such as whole slide scanners provide very large (up to 18GB) high resolution images. Such amounts of memory raise major issues that prevent usual image representation models from being used. Moreover, using such high resolution images, global image features, such as tissues, do not clearly appear at full resolution. Such images contain thus different hierarchical information at different resolutions. This paper presents the model of tiled top-down pyramids which provides a framework to handle such images. This model encodes a hierarchy of partitions of large images defined at different resolutions. We also propose a generic construction scheme of such pyramids whose validity is evaluated on an histological image application.