Techniques for Segmentation and Classification of Leukocytes in Blood Smear Images - A Review

Leukocytes present in the blood are responsible for providing protection against infections. Differential Blood Count is a medical procedure conducted by pathologists to identify and count the different kinds of leukocytes in blood to aid the identification of diseases. This procedure requires the pathologists to perform microscopic evaluation which is time consuming and human involvement in the process may produce error prone results. Many computer-aided systems have been designed to perform segmentation and categorization of leukocytes from the peripheral blood smear images to automate the process and reduce manual involvement. This paper presents a survey of different techniques proposed by researchers for segmentation and classification of leukocytes accentuating its pros and cons and the scope for future research in this context is also discussed.