Novel Methods for Microscopic Image Processing, Analysis, Classification and Compression

Novel Methods for Microscopic Image Processing, Analysis, Classification and Compression Alexander Suhre Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ahmet Enis Çetin May 2013 Microscopic images are frequently used in medicine and molecular biology. Many interesting image processing problems arise after the initial data acquisition step, since image modalities are manifold. In this thesis, we developed several algorithms in order to handle the critical pipeline of microscopic image storage/compression and analysis/classification more efficiently. The first step in our processing pipeline is image compression. Microscopic images are large in size (e.g. 100K-by-100K pixels), therefore finding efficient ways of compressing such data is necessary for efficient transmission, storage and evaluation. We propose an image compression scheme that uses the color content of a given image, by applying a block-adaptive color transform. Microscopic images of tissues have a very specific color palette due to the staining process they undergo before data acquisition. The proposed color transform takes advantage of this fact and can be incorporated into widely-used compression algorithms such as JPEG and JPEG 2000 without creating any overhead at the receiver due to its