Abstract The chromosomes are the genetic information carries. A healthy human being has 46 chromosomes. Any alteration in either the number of chromosomes or the structure of chromosomes in a human being is diagnosed as a genetic defect. To uncover the genetic defects the metaphase chromosomes are imaged and analyzed. The metaphase chromosome images often contain intensity inhomogeneity that makes the image segmentation task difficult. The difficulties caused by intensity inhomogeneity can be resolved by using region based active contours techniques. These techniques uses the local intensity values of the nearby regions of the objects and find the approximate intensity values along both sides of the contour. In the proposed work a segmentation technique has been proposed to segment the objects present in the human metaphase chromosome images using region based active contours. The proposed technique has been quite efficient from prospective of number of objects segmented. The method has been tested on Advanced Digital Imaging Research (ADIR) dataset. The experimental results have shown quite good performance.

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