White blood cell segmentation by distance mapping active contour

Abstract

White blood cell segmentations are an important research issue in Hematology and related study field. Our research proposes a segmentation of nucleus and cytoplasm of peripheral white blood cell from color image slides. The segmentation is started by using a dilated perimeter of nucleus convex hull which propagated into a surrounding region in order to setup a color reference table of cytoplasm. Primary cytoplasm region was then estimated roughly. Distance mapping was applied to this primary area and used to create a gradient vector flow. The active contouring technique was then implemented according to the vector field and finally segmented the WBC boundary. The obtained segmentation outputs show that active contour which guided by the distance mapping from a surrounding area is able to extract nucleus and cytoplasm region efficiently. © 2008 IEEE.