Infected cell identification in thin blood images based on color pixel classification: Comparison and analysis

Abstract

Malaria is an infectious disease which is mainly diagnosed by visual microscopical evaluation of Giemsa-stained thin blood films using a differential analysis of color features. This paper presents the evaluation of a color segmentation technique, based on standard supervised classification algorithms. The whole approach uses a general purpose classifier, which is parameterized and adapted to the problem of separating image pixels into three different classes: parasite, blood red cells and background. Assessment included not only four different supervised classification techniques - KNN, Naive Bayes, SVM and MLP - but different color spaces -RGB, normalized RGB, HSV and YCbCr-. Results show better performance for the KNN classifiers along with an improving feature characterization in the normalized RGB color space. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.