  In this paper, we propose a new model to segment cells in phase contrast
microscopy images. Cell images collected from the similar scenario share a
similar background. Inspired by this, we separate cells from the background in
images by formulating the problem as a low-rank and structured sparse matrix
decomposition problem. Then, we propose the inverse diffraction pattern
filtering method to further segment individual cells in the images. This is a
deconvolution process that has a much lower computational complexity when
compared to the other restoration methods. Experiments demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed model when it is compared with recent works.
