Comparative study of shape, intensity and texture features and support vector machine for white blood cell classification

The complete blood count (CBC) is widely used test for counting and categorizing various peripheral particles in the blood. The main goal of the paper is to count and classify white blood cells (leukocytes) in microscopic images into five major categories using features such as shape, intensity and texture features. The first critical step of counting and classification procedure involves segmentation of individual cells in cytological images of thin blood smears. The quality of segmentation has significant impact on the cell type identification, but poor quality, noise, and/or low resolution images make segmentation less reliable. We analyze the performance of our system for three different sets of features and we determine that the best performance is achieved by wavelet features using the Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT) which is based on multi-resolution characteristics of the image. These features are combined with the Support Vector Machine (SVM) which classifies white blood cells into their five primary types. This approach was validated with experiments conducted on digital normal blood smear images with low resolution.