An improved acute lymphoblastic leukemia image segmentation scheme based on HSV color space

In this paper, an improved HSV color space based Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) image segmentation scheme is proposed to improve accuracy of segmentation on digital microscope color images, especially for those taken in non;uniform background illumination conditions and by a microscope with different magnifications. The proposed method has several steps including contrast stretching, color space transformation, threshold segmentation, morphological operations and median filtering. Adopting two thresholds is the innovation of this work. For performance evaluation, 260 ALL blood cell images from ALL IDB2;a public and free available blood sample dataset are used. The experimental results show the proposed method gets a higher accuracy in segmenting both high; and low; contrast blood cell images than the original HSV color space based single threshold method, showing a better prospect in subsequent automatic acute lymphoblastic leukemia feature extraction and classification. © 2016 ICIC International