A system and method to segment an image captured from an image capture device of a high content imaging system includes an image acquisition module that receives the image captured by the image capture device. A coarse object detection module develops a coarse segmented image, wherein each pixel of the coarse segmented image is associated with a corresponding pixel in the captured image and is identified as one of an object pixel and a background pixel. A marker identification module selects at least one marker pixel from the pixels of the coarse segmented image, wherein each marker pixel is one of a contiguous group of object pixels in the coarse segmented image that is furthest from a background pixel relative to neighboring pixels of the group. An object splitting module that comprises a plurality of processors operating in parallel that associates each object pixel of the coarse segmented image with a marker pixel, wherein a distance based metric between the object pixel and the marker pixel is less than the distance based metric between the object pixel and any other marker pixel in the coarse segmented image.