Color Texture Features Based Approach for White

Blood Cells Segmentation

Mohammed Lamine BENOMAR
University Center Belhadj Bouchaib
Ain-Temouchent
Biomedical Engineering Laboratory
Tlemcen University, Algeria
benomaramine@gmail.com
Mourtada BENAZZOUZ Mostafa EL HABIB DAHO
Biomedical Engineering Laboratory Biomedical Engineering Laboratory
Tlemcen University, , Algeria Tlemcen University, Algeria
mourtada_benazzouz@hotmail.com mostafa.elhabibdaho@univ-tlemcen.dz

Abstract— Blood cell segmentation is an important

research topic in Hematology and other related fields. In this
article, a technique for microscopic images segmentation is
proposed in order to extract the white blood cells (WBC) and
its components (nucleus, cytoplasm) from the red blood cells
and plasma. The image is represented in different color spaces,
Haralick features extracted from the chromatic co-occurrence
matrices (CCM) are used to characterize the textures present
in these color images. A pre-treatment is carried out to extract
the background (plasma) in order to reduce the execution time
and noise. Segmentation has been done by supervised pixel-
based classification using support vector machines (SVM). The
proposed method was tested on twenty-seven real microscopic
color images with promising results and nucleus recognition
accuracy reaching 95%.
Keywords— microscopic image, white blood cells,
segmentation, color texture, chromatic co-occurrence matrices,
support vector machines.
I. INTRODUCTION
In Hematology, the blood cells analysis, particularly
white blood cells (WBCs), in microscopic images can
provide useful information about the health of patients. This
screening step is a manual activity that consists of a visual
inspection and analysis by the cytotechnologist of all cells
present on a slide in order to detect abnormal or suspect cells
and establish a diagnosis.
This analysis is of primary interest because the diagnosis
depends on the proper recognition of abnormal cells.
However, this is difficult and always remains a very long
process requiring concentration, experience, and competence
of the expert, the latter often risks making a mistake in the
diagnosis. To overcome this, an approach is needed to help
the cytotechnologist by using a computer system based on
image analysis to reduce the time and increase diagnostic
accuracy.
This article presents the first step in the construction of
an automatic cell recognition system. This approach consists
in segmenting microscopic cytology images, which is a
crucial step for automatic cell analysis; since the success of
pathological classification depends mainly on the correct
segmentation of the image.
Different algorithms and techniques have been developed
to solve the problem of image segmentation. However, there
is no generic solution to solve this issue. These techniques
must be combined with domain knowledge to find an
effective and robust segmentation method.
Fig. 1. Microscopic cytology image
In 1973 [1], Haralick introduced a statistical tool, co-
occurrence matrices, to measure the distribution of grey
levels in the image while taking into account the spatial
interactions between pixels. A texture approach based on
Haralick features was presented by Daniela et al. [2] in order
to enhance the white blood cells nucleus and cytoplasm
regions in bone marrow images. Madhloom et al.[4] develop
an automatic recognition system of normal and abnormal
white blood cells based on morphological and texture
attributes extraction, selection and cell classification.
In previous work, we have segmented the nucleus and
cytoplasm cells in microscopic images using pixel
classification (SVM) based on Haralick features, computed
on the grey level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM), in
Benomar et al. [5]. Plasma cell identification system in
microscopic images is proposed in Benazzouz et al. [6]. The
algorithm is a two-step process. Firstly, nucleus extraction is
performed by Otsu thresholding from the green channel, then
a region growing with circularity criterion delimitates the
cytoplasm. Segmentation scheme using pixel classification
based on the evidential fusion of color information to
segment white blood cells in cytological images is presented
in Benazzouz et al. [7]. Recently, Benomar et al.[3] have
implemented WBC segmentation in microscopic images
based on a combination of color and texture information. A
new color transformation have been proposed to make the
white blood cells regions more distinguishable then a
marker-controlled watershed algorithm, to delineate cell
boundaries, is used.
In our approach, the complete image is segmented into
four regions: nucleus, cytoplasm, red blood cell and
background (Fig. 1). We opted to use the Haralick attributes,
extracted from the chromatic co-occurrence matrices (CCM)
[8], for the characterization of the texture in color
microscopic images, followed by a pixel-based supervised
classification used Support Vector Machines (SVM) to
separate cell components.

978-1-7281-2642-5/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE

 This paper is organized as follows: an introduction and color component level is equal to . The parameters
overview of the cytological image segmentation domain in are defined by the user.
Section I, followed by a summary of the concept of color
texture and the Haralick features used in Section II. In Therefore, each color image for a given , can be
section III, the basic concepts of the SVM classifier are characterized by 6 CCMs: ,
explained. The main steps in segmentation and results are
presented in Section IV. The conclusions are given in section The CCM is sensitive to significant differences between
V. images resolution, since it measures the local interaction
between neighboring pixels. To reduce this sensitivity, it is
necessary to normalize these matrices by the global co-
II. FEATURES EXTRACTION occurrence number in the considered matrix:
A. Color Texture
There is no formal approach or precise definition of
texture [1, 9] even though it is omnipresent in images
(medical, aerial, textile,...). In terms of definition, the one Where is the number of levels of quantification of the
given by the dictionary, which simply specifies that texture is color channel (for an RGB true color image, ). In
the spatial duplication of a basic pattern in several directions. our previous studies [5], we used the value in order
to reduce time and to improve segmentation results.
Nonetheless, others more precise, including "texture is a
spatial structure constituted by the organization of primitives
each having a random aspect". Thus a texture is a two-level
hierarchical structure; the first concerns the description of the
basic elements that form the texture, and the second is to
describe the spatial relationships between these primitives.
However, when segmenting color texture images, it is
important to use discriminative attributes that best
characterize and differentiate the existing textures.
Furthermore, several authors have shown that the use of Fig. 2. The directions considered
color improves texture segmentation results compared to
simple grayscale methods [10, 8]. Therefore, we propose to Several authors don't use directly chromatic co-
focus on features that describe both texture and color to occurrence matrices to characterize color textures as they
segment white blood cells regions including nucleus and contain a large amount of information and require a
cytoplasm.. considerable memory space. Therefore, Haralick attributes
are computed from the CCM in order to reduce information
B. C hromatic Co-occurrence Matrices (CCM) while preserving the relevance of these characteristics [8].
In the literature, there exist various methods for Haralick proposes to extract texture features from different
extracting textural parameters. To this end, there are mainly directions and then calculate the mean and variance.
two classes: the structural methods and the statistical In his article [1] Haralick introduces fourteen texture features
approaches [1, 9]. In the first approach, the textures are extracted from the co-occurrence matrices. In this paper, we
described through the basic elements (primitive) and their used only 4 attributes to describe the White Blood Cells that
arrangement or placement rules. In the second approach, contain granules. These attributes are as follows:
statistical features allow the characterization of all types of
textures, even fine textures with no apparent regularity, 1. Energy :
according to color variation and neighboring pixels
relationships. That is the reason why we have adopted this
method, to segment the WBCs images, by computing the
well-known Haralick features from chromatic co-occurrence
matrices, which take into account spatial relationships within This feature measures the homogeneity of the image,
and between the color components of neighboring pixels [8], when this value is low, the image is more irregular and in
in contrast to our previous studies where we used only this case, there are many color transitions.
colorimetric characteristics [6, 12] or gray level co- 2. Contrast:
occurrence matrices [5].
Let's define these matrices for any noted color space
and let be the
CCM which measures the spatial interactions between the
two color channels and of the pixels in image at a
Contrast measures local color variations. When these
spatial distance from each other according to the
variations are important then the contrast will be high. This
direction (Fig. 2), usually the distance doesn't exceed a few
parameter also allows characterizing the dispersion of the
pixels in order to take into account only very local
values of the co-occurrence matrix with respect to its main
information. The content of the cell diagonal.
of this matrix shows the number of times that a pixel of
image with a color component level is equal to , has 3. Correlation
in its neighborhood, according to , a pixel whose

Where are respectively the means and
the standard deviation of . This parameter allows
to determine if some columns of the matrix are equal, in this
case, more the values are uniformly distributed in the
chromatic co-occurrences matrix and more the correlation is
important.
4. Entropy
This attribute measures the complexity of the image and
characterize the granulometries of the image. When the co-
occurrence matrix values are almost all equal then the
entropy value is high.
The CCMs are computed for the entire image, which is
not without problems when considering the possibility to
have different textures in the same image. As a solution to
this problem, we calculate the CCM on a sliding window
centered on each pixel of the image [10].
III. SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE
Vapnik [12] theory of Statistical Learning led to the
development of an algorithm class known as SVM (support
vector machine). Used for classification and regression. One
of the original aspects is its very good generalization ability
and learning procedure to produce a decision function that
uses only a subset of the learning base.
Let the instances with labels , the
important task in training SVM is to solve the following
quadratic problem:
Subject to and . Where is
the vector of all ones, is the upper bound of all variables,
is an symmetric matrix with , and
is the kernel function. The most used kernel
functions are polynomial, sigmoidal and radial Gaussian
functions. The SVM’s code program and a more detailed
discussion on SVMs can be found in [13].
IV. EXPERIMENTATION
A. Image Database
From blood smear and bone marrow samples taken from
patients in the Hemobiology department (Tlemcen
University Hospital), and an MGG coloring step (May
Grunwald Giemsa), we then performed a step of image
acquisition from the colored slides using a LEICA system
(camera and microscope) to finally obtain RGB color
images (24-bits) in Bitmap format.
Afterward, we used these images first to extract the color
features from the space channels (RGB, HSV, YUV), and
secondly the color texture features.
Twenty-seven microscopic images were used to evaluate
the proposed segmentation scheme. Our images have been
divided into 2 separate sets: the first one is intended for
learning step (containing 18 images), the second one for the
test phase (containing 9 images). The choice of these images
is based on a criterion of representativeness of all classes. In
our previous work[3,6,7], we have observed plasma
(background ) recognition rates of up to 99% ; also the
background of the image generally takes up a large part of
the image, which increases the processing time, so we
performed pre-processing on the basis of images to remove
the background region (Fig.3).
Fig. 3. Pre-processed microscopic image
B. Labelling method
In order to evaluate the segmentation results, we need a
labeled database (ground truth). To that aim, we labeled the
27 images in our database (Fig.4) using image processing
and retouching software; knowing that green represents the
nucleus, yellow for the cytoplasm, red for the red blood cells
and the background (plasma) in black.
We focus in this work on the detection of white blood
cells (nucleus and cytoplasm), since they represent the
region of interest to the clinician, in order to assist him in
the detection of diseases.
Fig. 4. Labelled image (ground truth)
C. Segmentation step
Our segmentation is based on pixel classification, and
we have opted for the SVM as classifier. First of all, we
build an SVM model applied to all the images in the
learning database (where each pixel of the images will be
represented by 72 attributes), this model will then be used to
apply it to the test images to finally have segmented images.
Composition of features:
For the color, nine features from the spaces
(R,G,B),(H,S,V) and ( Y,U,V) are selected.
 To characterize color textures, we propose to use
Haralick features extracted from the chromatic co-
occurrence matrices (CCMs). They have proven their
effectiveness in many research studies. Haralick [1,9]
suggests that the calculation be done in different directions
(0°, 45°, 90° and 135°) and averaged to make features
rotation invariant. The matrix is calculated on a sliding
window of size centered on each pixel of the image.
Thus, the calculation of Haralick's indices is done for each
pixel of the image. We tested three different windows (3x3,
5x5 and 7x7) and chose the 5x5 window centered on the
pixel considered, noting that this 5x5 window gave better
results, hence (Fig.5) using all
possible directions (0°,45°,90°,135°,180°).
To have reasonable conditions of computation time, we
only took 4 indices (energy, contrast, correlation and
entropy) of the 13 existing in Haralick [1]. These indices
will be applied on the 6 chromatic co-occurrence matrices of
each color space [14], example for the RGB:
(RR,GG,BB,RG,RB,RB,GB).
We will finally have 72 texture features = 3 color
spaces * 4 indices * 6 chromatic co-occurrence
matrices.
Fig. 5. The values of on a ( window
D. Results and discussions
We evaluated the segmentation performance of all the
test images compared to the ground truth images, for this we
used two indicators: the recognition rate (recall) and the
accuracy. Then a comparison of these results with those
obtained in precedent work [5], on the same basis of
microscopic images, using a segmentation technique by
SVM classifier applied to texture attributes at the grey level
(GLCM).
Several visual results of our segmentation are presented
in Figures 7 and 8. Table (I) shows the recognition and
accuracy rates obtained for cells components. The average
image classification time (512x384 pixels) per SVM applied
to the 72 characteristics is 305 seconds.
TABLE I. SEGMENTATION RESULTS OBTAINED
Nucleus Cytoplasm Red cell
Recall 94.05% 72.39% 91.84%
Accuracy 94.15% 81.33% 86.37%
From the numerical and visual results presented, we can
observe that the segmentation of the nucleus region is very
well achieved; this is due to the good characterization of its
color texture in this region, but also to the separation
performed by the SVM classifier from the other classes.
This distinction is visible in Fig.7(a) and Fig.8(a).
Nevertheless, there is still confusion between the regions
of the cytoplasm and red blood cells, mainly due to a
considerable similarity in their characteristics. This leads to
some misclassification of pixels belonging to other regions
classified as cytoplasm (false positives). This confusion has
been observed even in different studies using other
segmentation techniques and methods [3,7].
In addition, the original images contain clear regions in
the center of the red blood cells (Erythroblasts), due to the
smear preparation process, which leads to their classification
generally as cytoplasm or background, this can be corrected
by a filling operation in the post processing step. Since the
medical expert's diagnosis is based mainly on leukocytes
(nucleus + cytoplasm) we have thought it useful to add
some precision results regarding the nucleus and cytoplasm
(Table.II) and also the visual results for this type of cells
(Fig.6).
TABLE II. RESULTS AFTER POST-PROCESSING
Nucleus Cytoplasm
Recall 95.73% 74.52%
Accuracy 95.08% 84.65%
Fig. 6. (a) SVM result (b) Post processing result (c)Ground truth
In order to compare the results of our approach with
another segmentation method [5], Table (III) shows the
findings obtained on the same basis of microscopic images.
Promising segmentation results are also obtained in using the
texture on a grayscale image, which did not take full benefit
of the complementarity with color spaces. This comparison
will reveal the importance of color textures in improving the
characterization of regions of interest.
TABLE III. COMPARISON OF RESULTS WITH PREVIOUS WORK
Nucleus Cytoplasm
Accuracy (our results) 95.08% 84.65%
Accuracy (previous work [5]) 85.21% 53.23%
 Fig. 7. Segmentation samples: (a) original images (b) pre-
processed images (c)segmentation results and (d) ground truth
V. CONCLUSION
In this article, we present a segmentation of microscopic
cytology images, with the pixellar classification that is
adopted as the segmentation method. The choice of the
SVM classifier is justified first of all by a high classification
rate, but also by a rapid classification process. The
characterization of the pixels of the image is performed
through features from the RGB, HSV and YUV color
spaces, as well as other chromatic texture features. These
are our contributions to our previous work, and are
calculated using Haralick's attributes extracted from the
chromatic co-occurrence matrices (CCMs).
The results obtained are very promising, with a significantly
improved accuracy, this encourages us to continue our
efforts on the exploitation of textures by proposing another
more trendy technique based on Deep Learning.
I. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Mrs.N.Benmansour (Hemobiologist
Doctor - C.H.U. Tlemcen), who helped us by equipping us
with a microscope doted with LEICA camera for the
acquisition of cytological images, also providing colored
slides of different patients, as well as her assistance to
initiate us to recognize the different regions of the image for
the labelling.
Fig. 8. Segmentation samples: (a) original images (b) pre-
processed images (c)segmentation results and (d) ground truth
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