Oriented shape index histograms for cell classification

Abstract

We propose a novel extension to the shape index histogram feature descriptor where the orientation of the second-order curvature is included in the histograms. The orientation of the shape index is reminiscent but not equal to gradient orientation which is widely used for feature description.We evaluate our new feature descriptor using a public dataset consisting of HEp-2 cell images from indirect immunoflourescence lighting. Our results show that we can improve classification performance significantly when including the shape index orientation. Notably, we show that shape index orientation outperforms the gradient orientation on the dataset.