Thresholding-based White Blood Cells Segmentation from Microscopic Blood Images

Abstract

Digital image processing has a significant role in different research areas, including medical image processing, object detection, biometrics, information hiding, and image compression. Image segmentation, which is one of the most important steps in processing medical image, makes the objects inside images more meaningful. For example, from microscopic images, blood cancer can be identified which is known as leukemia; for this purpose at first, the white blood cells (WBCs) need to be segmented. This paper focuses on developing a segmentation technique for segmenting WBCs from microscopic blood images based on thresholding segmentation technique and it compares with the most commonly used segmentation technique which is known as color-k-means clustering. The comparison is done based on three well-known measurements, used for evaluating segmentation techniques which are probability random index, variance of information, and global consistency error. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed thresholding-based segmentation technique provides better results compared to color-k-means clustering technique for segmenting WBCs as well as the time consumption of the proposed technique is less than the color-k-means which are 70.8144 ms and 204.7188 ms, respectively.