What is Image Segmentation

Light microscopic examination of peripheral blood smear is considered vital for diagnosis of various hematological disorders. The objective of this paper is to develop a fast, robust and simple framework for blood microscopic image segmentation which can assist in automated detection of hematological diseases i.e. acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). A near set based clustering approach is followed for color based segmentation of lymphocyte blood image. Here, a novel distance measure using near sets has been introduced. This improved nearness distance measure has been used in a clustering framework for achieving accurate lymphocyte image segmentation. The nearness measure determines the degree to which two pixels resemble each other based on a defined probe function. It is essential as image segmentation is considered here as a colour based pixel clustering problem. Lymphocyte image segmentation algorithm developed here labels each pixel into nucleus, cytoplasm or background region based on the nearness measure.