White blood cell segmentation using morphological operators and scale-space analysis

Cell segmentation is a challenging problem due to both the complex nature of the cells and the uncertainty present in video microscopy. Manual methods for this purpose are onerous, imprecise and highly subjective, thus requiring automated methods that perform this task in an objective and efficient way. In this paper, we propose a novel method to segment nucleus and cytoplasm of white blood cells (WBC). WBC composition of the blood provides important information to doctors and plays an important role in the diagnosis of different diseases. We use simple morphological operators and explore the scale-space properties of a toggle operator to improve the segmentation accuracy. The proposed scheme has been successfully applied to a large number of images, showing promising results for varying cell appearance and image quality, encouraging future works.

[1]  Mohamed A. Deriche,et al.  Scale-Space Properties of the Multiscale Morphological Dilation-Erosion , 1996, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[2]  Leyza Baldo Dorini,et al.  A scaled morphological toggle operator for image transformations , 2006, 2006 19th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing.

[3]  Alexandre X. Falcão,et al.  Tree-Pruning: A New Algorithm and Its Comparative Analysis with the Watershed Transform for Automatic Image Segmentation , 2006, 2006 19th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing.

[4]  Jorge Stolfi,et al.  The image foresting transform: theory, algorithms, and applications , 2004 .

[5]  Roberto Marcondes Cesar Junior,et al.  Inexact graph matching for model-based recognition: Evaluation and comparison of optimization algorithms , 2005, Pattern Recognit..

[6]  L. Vincent.  Graphs and mathematical morphology , 1989 .

[7]  Fernand Meyer,et al.  Graph-based object tracking , 2003, Proceedings 2003 International Conference on Image Processing (Cat. No.03CH37429).

[8]  Nipon Theera-Umpon,et al.  White Blood Cell Segmentation and Classification in Microscopic Bone Marrow Images , 2005, FSKD.

[9]  Horst Bunke,et al.  Recent developments in graph matching , 2000, Proceedings 15th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. ICPR-2000.

[10]  J. Serra,et al.  An overview of morphological filtering , 1992 .

[11]  G. Matheron.  Random Sets and Integral Geometry , 1976 .

[12]  Luc Vincent,et al.  Watersheds in Digital Spaces: An Efficient Algorithm Based on Immersion Simulations , 1991, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[13]  Edward R. Dougherty,et al.  Hands-on Morphological Image Processing , 2003 .

[14]  Marcel J. T. Reinders,et al.  Image sharpening by morphological filtering , 2000, Pattern Recognit..

[15]  Roberto Marcondes Cesar Junior,et al.  Inexact Graph Matching for Facial Feature Segmentation and Recognition in Video Sequences: Results on Face Tracking , 2003, CIARP.

[16]  Alexandre X. Falcão,et al.  IFT-Watershed from gray-scale marker , 2002, Proceedings. XV Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing.

[17]  Isabelle Bloch,et al.  Fuzzy morphisms between graphs , 2002, Fuzzy Sets Syst..

[18]  T. V. Sreenivas,et al.  Teager energy based blood cell segmentation , 2002, 2002 14th International Conference on Digital Signal Processing Proceedings. DSP 2002 (Cat. No.02TH8628).

[19]  Pierre Soille,et al.  Morphological Image Analysis: Principles and Applications , 2003 .

[20]  Kan Jiang,et al.  A novel white blood cell segmentation scheme using scale-space filtering and watershed clustering , 2003, Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.03EX693).

[21]  Mario Vento,et al.  Thirty Years Of Graph Matching In Pattern Recognition , 2004, Int. J. Pattern Recognit. Artif. Intell..

[22]  Andrew G. Dempster,et al.  Segmentation of blood images using morphological operators , 2000, Proceedings 15th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. ICPR-2000.

[23]  Jean Serra,et al.  Image Analysis and Mathematical Morphology , 1983 .

[24]  Qingmin Liao,et al.  An accurate segmentation method for white blood cell images , 2002, Proceedings IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging.

[25]  Isabelle Bloch,et al.  Inexact graph matching by means of estimation of distribution algorithms , 2002, Pattern Recognit..