Leukocyte recognition in human fecal samples using texture features

Unlike urine or blood samples with a single background, human fecal samples contain large amounts of food debris, amorphous particles, and undigested plant cells. It is difficult to segment such impurities when mixed with leukocytes. Cell degradation results in ambiguous nuclei, incompleteness of the cell membrane, and a changeable cell morphology, which are difficult to recognize. Aiming at the segmentation problem, a threshold segmentation method combining an inscribed circle and circumscribed circle is proposed to effectively remove the adhesion impurities with a segmentation accuracy reaching 97.6%. For the identification problem, five texture features (i.e., LBP-uniform, Gabor, HOG, GLCM, and Haar) were extracted and classified using four kinds of classifiers (support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network, AdaBoost, and random forest). The experimental results show that using a histogram of oriented gradient features with an SVM classifier can achieve precision of 88.46% and recall of 88.72%.