Malaria parasite detection in giemsa-stained blood cell images

Abstract

This research represents a method to detect malaria parasite in blood samples stained with giemsa. In order to increase the accuracy of detecting, at the first step, the red blood cell mask is extracted. It is due to the fact that most of malaria parasites exist in red blood cells. Then, stained elements of blood such as red blood cells, parasites and white blood cells are extracted. At the next step, red blood cell mask is located on the extracted stained elements to separate the possible parasites. Finally, color histogram, granulometry, gradient and flat texture features are extracted and used as classifier inputs. Here, five classifiers were used: support vector machines (SVM), nearest mean (NM), K nearest neighbors (KNN), 1-NN and Fisher. In this research K nearest neighbors classifier had the best accuracy, which was 91%.