Leukocyte segmentation and classification in blood-smear images.

The detection and classification of leukocytes in blood smear images is a routine task in medical diagnosis. In this paper we present a fully automated approach to leukocyte segmentation that is robust with respect to cell appearance and image quality. A set of features is used to describe cytoplasm and nucleus properties. Pairwise SVM classification is used to discriminate between different cell types. Evaluation on a set of 1166 images (13 classes) resulted in 95% correct segmentations and 75% to 99% correct classification (with reject option).