Many cell lines currently used in medical research, such as cancer cells or stem cells, grow in confluent sheets or colonies. The biology of individual cells provide valuable information, thus the separation of touching cells in these microscopy images is critical for counting, identification and measurement of individual cells. Over-segmentation of single cells continues to be a major problem for methods based on morphological watershed due to the high level of noise in microscopy cell images. There is a need for a new segmentation method that is robust over a wide variety of biological images and can accurately separate individual cells even in challenging datasets such as confluent sheets or colonies.