Improving colour image segmentation on acute myelogenous leukaemia images using contrast enhancement techniques

Contrast enhancement and image segmentation play an important process in most medical image analysis tasks. One of the main tasks is the analyzing of white blood cells (WBC) where the WBC composition reveals important diagnostic information of a patient. This paper presents a two phase methodology in order to obtain a fully segmented abnormal white blood cell (blast) and nucleus in acute leukaemia images. In the first phase, the three contrast enhancement techniques which are partial contrast, bright stretching and dark stretching were used to improve the image quality. Contrast enhancement techniques enhanced the area of interest of acute leukaemia for easing the segmentation process. In the second phase, image segmentation based on HSI (Hue, Saturation, Intensity) colour space is proposed. The proposed technique helps to improve the image visibility and has successfully segmented the acute leukaemia images into two main components: blast and nucleus. The combination between contrast enhancements and image segmentation has good effect on improving the accuracy of segmentation. Hence, information gain from the resultant images would become useful for haematologists to further analysis the types of acute leukaemia.