Correlation Filters for Detection of Cellular Nuclei in Histopathology Images

Nuclei detection in histology images is an essential part of computer aided diagnosis of cancers and tumors. It is a challenging task due to diverse and complicated structures of cells. In this work, we present an automated technique for detection of cellular nuclei in hematoxylin and eosin stained histopathology images. Our proposed approach is based on kernelized correlation filters. Correlation filters have been widely used in object detection and tracking applications but their strength has not been explored in the medical imaging domain up till now. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme gives state of the art accuracy and can learn complex nuclear morphologies. Like deep learning approaches, the proposed filters do not require engineering of image features as they can operate directly on histopathology images without significant preprocessing. However, unlike deep learning methods, the large-margin correlation filters developed in this work are interpretable, computationally efficient and do not require specialized or expensive computing hardware. Availability: A cloud based webserver of the proposed method and its python implementation can be accessed at the following URL: http://faculty.pieas.edu.pk/fayyaz/software.html#corehist.