Asbestos detection from microscope images using support vector random field of local color features

Abstract

In this paper, an asbestos detection method from microscope images is proposed. The asbestos particles have different colors in two specific angles of the polarizing plate. Therefore, human examiners use the color information to detect asbestos. To detect the asbestos by computer, we develop the detector based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) of local color features. However, when it is applied to each pixel independently, there are many false positives and negatives because it does not use the relation with neighboring pixels. To take into consideration of the relation with neighboring pixels, Conditional Random Field (CRF) with SVM outputs is used. We confirm that the accuracy of asbestos detection is improved by using the relation with neighboring pixels. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.