Novel color normalization method for hematoxylin eosin stained histopathology images

Abstract

With the advent of computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD), the accuracy of cancer detection from histopathology images is significantly increased. However, color variation in the CAD system is inevitable due to the variability of stain concentration and manual tissue sectioning. The small variation in color may lead to the misclassification of cancer cells. Therefore, color normalization is a very much essential step prior to segmentation and classification in order to reduce the inter-variability of background color among a set of source images. In this paper, a novel color normalization method is proposed for Hematoxylin and Eosin stained histopathology images. Conventional Reinhard algorithm is modified in our proposed method by incorporating fuzzy logic. Moreover, mathematically, it is proved that our proposed method satisfies all three hypotheses of color normalization. Furthermore, several quality metrics are estimated locally for evaluating the performance of various color normalization methods. The experimental result reveals that our proposed method has outperformed all other benchmark methods.