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Intuitionistic fuzzy set and fuzzy mathematical morphology applied to color leukocytes segmentation

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Abstract

This work presents a new algorithm based on Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy sets and fuzzy mathematical morphology to leukocytes segmentation in color images. The main idea is based on modeling a color image as an Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy set using the hue component in the HSV color space. Then, a pixel labeled as leukocyte is selected and compared to the whole image with a similarity measure. Thus, the leukocyte is segmented and separated from the rest of the image. The experimental results show that the algorithm has a good performance, reaching a value of 99.41% for the correct classification of leukocytes and a 99.23% for the correct classification of the background. Other metrics such as accuracy, precision and recall have been calculated obtaining 99.32%, 99.41% and 99.24%, respectively. The algorithm presents two important characteristics: It works directly over the color images without the need of converting the image in gray scale, and it does not produce false colors because fuzzy morphological operators guarantee it.

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Acknowledgements

A. Bouchet acknowledges the support of the international internship program of Santander Bank-University of Oviedo (year 2017). I. Díaz acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology under Project TIN-2017-87600-P. I. Díaz and S. Montes acknowledge the support of the Regional Government of Asturias (Spain) under the Project FC-GRUPIN-IDI/2018/000176.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICYTE, CONICET - UNMDP, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Mar del Plata, Argentina

    Agustina Bouchet & Virginia Ballarin

  2. Department of Statistics and O.R., University of Oviedo, Gijón, Spain

    Susana Montes

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

    Irene Díaz

Authors
  1. Agustina Bouchet
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  2. Susana Montes
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  3. Virginia Ballarin
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  4. Irene Díaz
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Correspondence to Agustina Bouchet.

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Bouchet, A., Montes, S., Ballarin, V. et al. Intuitionistic fuzzy set and fuzzy mathematical morphology applied to color leukocytes segmentation. SIViP 14, 557–564 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-019-01586-2

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