Leukocytes Segmentation Using Markov Random Fields

The segmentation of leukocytes and their components plays an important role in the extraction of geometric, texture, and morphological characteristics used to diagnose different diseases. This paper presents a novel method to segment leukocytes and their respective nucleus and cytoplasm from microscopic bone marrow leukemia cell images. Our method uses color and texture contextual information of image pixels to extract cellular elements from images, which show heterogeneous color and texture staining and high-cell population. The CIE L*a*b* color space is used to extract color features, whereas a 2D Wold Decomposition model is applied to extract structural and stochastic texture features. The color and texture contextual information is incorporated into an unsupervised binary Markov Random Field segmentation model. Experimental results show the performance of the proposed method on both synthetic and real leukemia cell images. An average accuracy of 95% was achieved in the segmentation of real cell images by comparing those results with manually segmented cell images.