An efficient system for automatic blood type determination based on image matching techniques

Abstract

This paper presents a fast and accurate system to determine the type of blood automatically based on image processing. Blood type determination is important in emergency situations, where there is a need for blood transfusion to save lives. The traditional blood determination techniques are performed manually by a specialist in medical labs, where the result requires a long time or may be affected by human error. This may cause serious consequences or even endanger people’s lives. The proposed approach performs blood determination in real-time with low cost using any available mobile device equipped with a camera. A total of 500 blood samples were processed in this study using different image matching techniques including oriented fast and rotated brief (ORB), scale invariant feature transform (SIFT), and speed-up robust feature (SURF). The evaluation results show that our proposed system, which adopts the ORB algorithm, is the fastest and the most accurate among the state-of-the-art systems. It can achieve an accuracy of 99.6% in an average time of 250 ms.