Unsupervised Leukocyte Image Segmentation Using Rough Fuzzy Clustering

The segmentation of leukocytes and their components acts as the foundation for all automated image-based hematological disease recognition systems. Perfection in image segmentation is a necessary condition for improving the diagnostic accuracy in automated cytology. Since the diagnostic information content of the segmented images is plentiful, suitable segmentation routines need to be developed for better disease recognition. Clustering is an essential image segmentation procedure which segments an image into desired regions. A judicious integration of rough sets and fuzzy sets is suitably employed towards leukocyte segmentation in a clustering framework. In this study, the goodness of fuzzy sets and rough sets is suitably integrated to achieve improved segmentation performance. The membership concept of fuzzy sets endow is efficient handling of overlapping partitions, and the rough sets provide a reasonable solution to deal with uncertainty, vagueness, and incompleteness in data. Such synergistic combination gives the proposed scheme an edge over standard cluster-based segmentation techniques, that is, K-means, K-medoid, fuzzy c-means, and rough c-means. Comparative analysis reveals that the hybrid rough fuzzy c-means algorithm is robust in segmenting stained blood microscopic images. The accomplished segmented nucleus and cytoplasm of a leukocyte can be used for feature extraction which leads to automated leukemia detection.