  Phase contrast microscopy (PCM) has been widely used in biomedicine research,
which allows users to observe objectives without staining or killing them. One
important related research is to employ PCM to monitor live cells. How to
segment cell populations in obtained PCM images gains more and more attention
as its a critical step for downstream applications, such as cell tracking, cell
classification and others. Many papers have been published to deal with this
problem from different perspectives. In this paper we aim to present a
comprehensive review on the development of PCM cell population segmentation.
