Colour based Image Segmentation for Automated

Detection of Leukaemia: A comparison between

CIELAB and CMYK colour spaces
Anilkumar K. K.
Dept. of Electronics and Communication
Cochin University College of
Engineering Kuttanad
Pulincunnu, Alappuzha, Kerala, India
kkanil@cusat.ac.in
Manoj V.J.
Dept. of Electronics and Communication
Cochin University College of
Engineering Kuttanad
Pulincunnu, Alappuzha, Kerala, India
manojmvj@gmail.com
Sagi T. M.
Dept. of Medical Lab Technology
School of Medical Education
Gandhinagar, Kottayam
Kerala, India
sagianil101@gmail.com

Abstract—Leukaemia is an abnormal proliferation of White
Blood Cells in the bone marrow and peripheral blood. The
diagnosis of leukaemia is done by the pathologists and
haematologists by observing a peripheral blood smear and bone
marrow smear under a microscope. Advanced cytochemistry
tests, immunophenotyping, flow cytometry, chromosome analysis
etc. are used to confirm the incidence of leukaemia. Since these
tests are time intense and exorbitant, image analysis of the blood
and bone marrow smear can be used to assist the pathologists
and haematologists for a quick diagnosis of leukaemia. A simple
method to detect the incidence of leukaemia automatically by
image processing techniques is proposed in this paper. The
method uses colour based image segmentation using k-means
clustering and image analysis by Hausdorff Dimension to detect
leukaemia. The image in the RGB colour model is converted to
the CIELAB as well as CMYK colour spaces and a comparison
between the two in detecting leukaemia is also presented.
Keywords—Leukaemia, segmentation, Hausdorff
Dimension, k- means, clustering
I. INTRODUCTION
Leukaemia is a type of cancer that affects blood cells and
sometimes commonly known as Blood Cancer. Leukaemia
usually originates in the bone marrow and leads to an
abnormal spread of White Blood Cells (WBCs). These WBCs
are not completely developed and are known as blasts [1]. The
exact cause of Leukaemia is not known to the medical world
and may be due to inherited factors and environmental factors.
About 62130 cases of leukaemia is diagnosed in the U.S. in
2017 [33]. There are around 9900 new Leukaemia cases in the
U.K. every year [34]. In India, more than 10,000 cases of
childhood Leukaemia are reported every year.
The human blood comprises of three types of cells;
Erythrocytes or Red Blood cells (RBCs), Leukocytes or White
Blood Cells (WBCs), and Thrombocytes or Platelets. About
45% of whole blood is RBC, about 54.3% is plasma and about
0.7% is WBC. Leukaemia results in large number of abnormal
WBCs and this in turn leads to reduced count of normal blood
cells. Symptoms of Leukaemia are bleeding, bruising
problems, fatigue, fever and an increased threat of infections
[5]. These symptoms are due to reduced count of normal blood
cells [1].
On the basis of cell-line of origin, Leukaemia is classified
into Myeloid or Lymphoid and based on the clinical course it
is classified into Acute or Chronic. This leads to four main
categories of leukaemia; Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML),
Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia (CML), Acute Lymphoblastic
Leukaemia (ALL) and Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia
(CLL). AML is the most common form of acute leukaemia
during the first few months of life. It is rare in childhood and
adolescence but it is the most frequently observed acute
leukaemia in middle and later years of life. CML occurs
primarily in young and middle aged adults. ALL occurs
primarily in children between two and ten years of age. It also
occurs in middle-aged and elderly adults. Most cases of CLL
occurs over the age of 60 and it is more than twice as common
in men as in women [1].
The diagnosis of Leukaemia is usually done by the
haematologists and pathologists by manually observing a
blood smear of the patient under a microscope. An abnormal
WBC count may be an indication of leukaemia [1, 2]. The
count and structure of the blast cells compared to the normal
cells are used to identify and classify leukaemia. The
leukaemia can be confirmed and the specific type can be
identified by a needle biopsy and aspiration of bone marrow
from a pelvic bone. The conventional method is time
consuming and greatly influenced by the skill, ability and
fatigue level of the persons involved in the diagnostic
procedures. Advanced methods such as cytochemistry tests,
immunophenotyping, chromosome tests etc. can also be done
to confirm leukaemia but are expensive and time consuming
for a routine examination [6, 7, 8].
Image processing and analysis of the peripheral blood
smear and bone marrow smear images can be used to assist the
haematologists and pathologists to identify many diseases like
malaria, skin diseases, leukaemia etc. Automated counting of
blood cells can also be implemented by image processing
techniques. These methods are fast, easy and less expensive
and help the pathologists for a quick diagnosis. A remote
diagnosis is also very easy as the image can be transmitted to
any location over the internet rather than sending the blood
sample.

978-1-5386-0576-9/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE

 Many research have done in the past for developing
automated systems that can model human vision for analysing
and understanding images. Most of such methods concentrate
on automated image segmentation followed by feature
extraction and classification [5]. There are many studies to
develop automated systems for segmentation and
classification of leukaemia images [2, 3], [5 – 8], [9 – 16], [18
– 23] and [26]. Some studies focused on segmentation and
feature extraction on gray scale images as it is simple
compared to colour images [3, 4, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 18]. Many
works attempted colour based segmentation by converting the
RGB image to CIELAB colour model [2, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12]. Few
researchers tried segmentation and feature extraction in the
HSV colour space [10, 20, 21]. Many segmentation algorithms
are presented in the literature which includes Thresholding
based segmentation, k-means clustering, Fuzzy based C-means
clustering (FCM), Watershed segmentation etc. Many studies
used k-means segmentation algorithm followed by
morphological operations and use of Support Vector Machine
(SVM) for image classification. The works in [2, 5, 6, 8] and
[20] used k-means clustering algorithm for image
segmentation. Fuzzy C-means algorithm is used for image
segmentation in [7, 12, 17, 26]. The work in [9] employed
Snake algorithm followed by Zack thresholding for
segmenting the nucleus and cytoplasm of cells. Thresholding
based on Otsu method was used in [13, 18] for segmentation.
The work in [14, 21] employed Watershed segmentation.
Image processing combined with Genetic Algorithm is used in
[19] for automated detection of leukaemia cells. Most of the
works available in the literature deal with sub images, that is,
analysis and feature extraction is based on single WBC to
detect and classify leukaemia. The study in [2] deals with
feature extraction based on whole blood smear image
containing multiple nuclei rather than analysing single cell to
detect and classify AML. This study also analyses whole
image of peripheral blood smear and bone marrow smear to
detect the presence of leukaemia in general. The classification
of leukaemia into various types is not attempted in the paper.
The analysis is based on fractal dimension and a comparison
between CIELAB (L*a*b*) and CMYK colour spaces in
detecting leukaemia is proposed. A statistical comparison
between the fractal dimensions of the samples in two colour
spaces is also given [32]. Comparison between different
colour spaces in detecting leukaemia is not attempted by the
earlier studies.
The remaining part of the paper is organised as follows.
Section II deals with process block diagram of the proposed
method. Section III is about materials and methods.
Experimental results are presented in section IV and section V
focuses conclusion.
II. PROCESS BLOCK DIAGRAM
Fig. 1 shows the system overview. The input images used
in the study are in the RGB format. The first step is Pre-
processing, where Median filtering is performed on the image
to remove any noise that might have affected the image at the
time of acquisition. Then the RGB image is converted into
CIELAB colour space and CMYK colour space. k–means
clustering is then performed to segment the blood cells to
separate the WBCs. The analysis step mainly involves
measuring the fractal dimension and statistical comparison.
III. MATERIALS AND METHODS
Image Samples
The sample images are obtained from the online data
bank of American Society of Haematology (ASH) [29]. The
ASH image bank is a web based image data bank which has a
large pool of good quality images pertaining to a widespread
category of various haematological conditions. We
downloaded 25 image sample from ASH image bank out of
which 5 are images of normal blood smear and the remaining
20 corresponds to different leukaemia cases. A resolution of
326 x 245 pixels is used for all images in our study. Fig. 2
shows image of a normal blood smear and Fig.3 that of a
leukaemia patient.
Pre-processing
Pre- processing involves removing any noise that would
have affected the image at the time of image acquisition. The
RGB image is split into Red, Green, and Blue components and
median filtering is applied to individual component and later
combined to form filtered RGB image.
Colour Conversion
CIELAB (CIEL*a*b*) colour space
The image of a blood smear is usually acquired by digital
microscopes and the image will be generally in the RGB
format. The image in the RGB format is converted to some
other colour space for clustering because segmentation is
difficult in the RGB colour model. One method of the
proposed study is to map the RGB colour space to the
CIELAB (CIEL*a*b* or L*a*b*) colour model. CIELAB is a
colour model defined by the International Commission on
Illumination (CIE) in 1976. In L*a*b* colour space the colour
is represented using three components. L* is the lightness
component and a* and b* are the chromaticity components
where a* corresponds to green-red and b* corresponds to blue-
yellow. CIELAB colour model is perceptually uniform with
respect to the human vision so that the same amount of change
in the component values leads to same amount of change in
visual perception. L* = 0, denotes darkest black and L* = 100,
denotes brightest white. Positive a* indicates red and negative
a* represents green. Positive b* denotes yellow and blue is
denoted by negative b*. In CIELAB, the perceptual difference
between colours is proportional to the Cartesian distance and
hence the difference in colour between two samples can be
found by Euclidean distance [2].
 Fig. 1 System Overview

observations into k clusters. That is each pixel in an image is

assigned to one of the k clusters for which the mean distance
between the pixel and the cluster centre is minimum. In a
blood smear image there are different regions such as WBCs,
Background, RBCs and other cells. In a blood smear of a
patient with leukaemia, most of the WBCs become blasts.
These blast cells, including normal WBCs if any, is our region
Fig.2 Normal Blood Smear Fig.3 A case of leukaemia of interest to detect leukaemia. In our study, by setting k = 3,
k-means clustering segments the pixels in the image of the
CMYK colour space blood smear into three clusters and all the blast cells are
segmented in one of the clusters. The segmented image in this
In this study, the images in the RGB format is also cluster is used for image analysis to detect leukaemia. The
converted to the CMYK colour model, for comparison. segmentation is carried out in L*a*b* as well as CMYK
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. It is a colour space for each image sample for comparison purpose.
subtractive colour model and is used in colour printing. Cyan, Fig. 4 shows the segmented blast cells for the leukaemia
magenta, and yellow are the secondary colours of light. They image shown in Fig. 3.
are the primary colours of pigments. When a surface coated
Image Analysis
with cyan pigment is lightened with white light, no red light is
reflected from the surface. Similarly, pure magenta and pure The segmentation is followed by analysis to extract
yellow does not reflect green and blue, respectively. By features of interest from the segmented cells which are then
subtracting the individual RGB values from 1, we can obtain compared with the features of normal blood smear to detect
the CMYK values from a set of RGB values. the presence of leukaemia. In this paper, Fractal Dimension of
the segmented image is computed and compared it with that of
Segmentation the normal blood smear image to detect the occurrence of
Segmentation is used to subdivide an image into its leukaemia.
integral regions or objects [24, 25]. The degree to which the
segmentation should be carried out depends upon the
requirement. That means, the segmentation should stop when
the regions or objects of interest in an image have been
segregated [30, 31]. In this work the segmentation is used to
isolate the blast cells to detect the incidence of leukaemia.
The approach used is to partition an image into areas that are
similar. The WBCs in the blood smear image can be separated
into a cluster and analysis can be performed on this cluster to
detect leukaemia. There are number of methods presented in
the previous works for image segmentation such as
Thresholding, Region based segmentation, k-means clustering,
FCM, Watershed segmentation etc. k-means is still a widely
used segmentation method.
Fig. 4 Segmented Image
k-means Clustering: k-means algorithm was first suggested
by James MacQueen in 1967 [5]. k-means clustering divides n
 Fractal Dimension: A fractal is an abstract object used to
define naturally occurring objects. Artificially developed
fractals show similar patterns at increasingly small scales.
Many have used fractals in medicine and science for various
numerical measurements [27]. The fractal dimension is a
statistical parameter that shows how completely a fractal
appears to fill space [2]. Roughness of the perimeter of blast
cells is an important parameter to distinguish a blast cell and
normal cell. Hausdorff Dimension (HD) is a vital feature for
fractal geometry and is used in our system to detect leukaemia
by comparing the HD of the segmented blast cells with that of
the normal blood smear image. The algorithm for HD
computation by box counting method [28] is given below:
CIELAB colour space for the samples is 0.97998 and the
mean in CMYK colour space is 0.9829.
Table IV Shows the HD values for the segmented leukaemia
images in L*a*b* and CMYK colour spaces. The incidence of
leukaemia is detected by comparing the HD of the segmented
image with the mean value of the normal cases. The HD for all
leukaemia cases in L*a*b* colour model is greater than that of
the mean value of 0.97998 of the normal samples.
TABLE I. SEGMENTATION RESULTS
Image sample
Segmented blasts Segmented blasts
(L*a*b*) (CMYK)

1) Convert the L*a*b*/CMYK image to binary image.

2) A grid of N squares is overlaid over the image and
count the number of squares occupied by the image.
3) Repeat step 2 for a growing number of squares.
4) The Hausdorff Dimension, HD is then given by:
Normal Image HD = 0.9481 HD = 0.9390

Where, N is the number of squares in the grid and is

the number of boxes occupied by the image. Higher HD TABLE II. SEGMENTATION RESULTS
indicates higher degree of roughness of the perimeter of cells.
Image sample Segmentedblasts Segmented blasts
A comparison between HD values in CIELAB and CMYK (L*a*b*) (CMYK)
colour model is done by calculating the Mean value of HD in
the two cases.

IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

Leukaemia Image HD = 1.4075 HD = 1.3956
The image data set consists of 25 images downloaded from
the online image data bank of ASH out of which 5 are normal
blood smear images and the remaining 20 are pertaining to
different cases of leukaemia. All the images in RGB colour The HD for all leukaemia cases in CMYK colour space is also
model is adjusted to resolution of 326 x 245 pixels and then greater than that of the mean value of 0.9828 of the normal
the conversion to the CIELAB colour space is performed. This samples. That is, the incidence of leukaemia in all the 20 cases
considered, detected correctly in L*a*b* as well as CMYK
is followed by colour based image segmentation using k-
colour space.
means clustering as explained in section III. Hausdorff
Dimension is then computed for the segmented images. The
segmentation and HD computation process is then repeated for TABLE III. HD FOR NORMAL IMAGES
all the images after performing RGB to CMYK colour space
conversion, for comparison. Table I shows the segmentation Images Hausdorff Dimension
result of a normal image in the two colour spaces along with (Normal cases) L*a*b* CMYK
the computed HD. Table II shows the segmentation result of a Sample 1 0.9481 0.9390
leukaemia image in the two colour spaces along with the
Sample2 1.1733 1.1306
computed HD. It can be seen that the segmented blasts are
clearer in CIELAB colour model. This study used the higher Sample 3 0.8477 0.8349
HD value of the segmented leukaemia image, compared to Sample 4 0.9702 1.0578
that of a normal image, to segregate leukaemia cases from
Sample 5 0.9606 0.9522
normal cases.
Table III Shows the HD values for the normal images in Mean 0.97998 0.9829
CIELAB and CMYK colour spaces. The mean value of HD in
 TABLE IV. HD FOR LEUKAEMIA IMAGES

Images
Hausdorff Dimension VI. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
(Leukaemia cases) L*a*b* CMYK We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the
American Society for Hematology for their online data bank
Sample 1 1.3311 1.3271
of high quality image samples.
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