Color normalization method using hue histogram Gaussian mixtures

Color variations occurred due to inconsistencies in histology slides preparation stages degrades the quantitative analysis performance of histopathological images. Several color deconvolution and color modification methods have been proposed to eliminate these negative effects. In this article, a Hue, Saturation, Value space color normalization method for hematoxylin and eosin stained histopathology slide images is presented. In the proposed method, a hue histogram is represented as a binary Gaussian mixture and then each mixture component is transferred to a predefined fixed Gaussian distribution. The proposed method does not require any user intervention. The impact of the proposed method to the separation of the texture feature vector groups obtained from healthy and cancerous tissue sections of a histopathological image database was presented by comparing the group separability measures calculated using original and normalized images.