Self-supervised Pretraining of Cell Segmentation Models

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Hauptverfasser: Stillwagon, Kaden, VandeLoo, Alexandra Dunnum, Magondu, Benjamin, Forest, Craig R.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Stillwagon, Kaden
VandeLoo, Alexandra Dunnum
Magondu, Benjamin
Forest, Craig R.
author_facet Stillwagon, Kaden
VandeLoo, Alexandra Dunnum
Magondu, Benjamin
Forest, Craig R.
contents Instance segmentation enables the analysis of spatial and temporal properties of cells in microscopy images by identifying the pixels belonging to each cell. However, progress is constrained by the scarcity of high-quality labeled microscopy datasets. Many recent approaches address this challenge by initializing models with segmentation-pretrained weights from large-scale natural-image models such as Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, representations learned from natural images often encode objectness and texture priors that are poorly aligned with microscopy data, leading to degraded performance under domain shift. We propose DINOCell, a self-supervised framework for cell instance segmentation that leverages representations from DINOv2 and adapts them to microscopy through continued self-supervised training on unlabeled cell images prior to supervised fine-tuning. On the LIVECell benchmark, DINOCell achieves a SEG score of 0.784, improving by 10.42% over leading SAM-based models, and demonstrates strong zero-shot performance on three out-of-distribution microscopy datasets. These results highlight the benefits of domain-adapted self-supervised pretraining for robust cell segmentation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10609
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-supervised Pretraining of Cell Segmentation Models
Stillwagon, Kaden
VandeLoo, Alexandra Dunnum
Magondu, Benjamin
Forest, Craig R.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Quantitative Methods
Instance segmentation enables the analysis of spatial and temporal properties of cells in microscopy images by identifying the pixels belonging to each cell. However, progress is constrained by the scarcity of high-quality labeled microscopy datasets. Many recent approaches address this challenge by initializing models with segmentation-pretrained weights from large-scale natural-image models such as Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, representations learned from natural images often encode objectness and texture priors that are poorly aligned with microscopy data, leading to degraded performance under domain shift. We propose DINOCell, a self-supervised framework for cell instance segmentation that leverages representations from DINOv2 and adapts them to microscopy through continued self-supervised training on unlabeled cell images prior to supervised fine-tuning. On the LIVECell benchmark, DINOCell achieves a SEG score of 0.784, improving by 10.42% over leading SAM-based models, and demonstrates strong zero-shot performance on three out-of-distribution microscopy datasets. These results highlight the benefits of domain-adapted self-supervised pretraining for robust cell segmentation.
title Self-supervised Pretraining of Cell Segmentation Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10609