Automatic Counting for Canine Red Blood Cell based on Two-stage Circular Hough Transform

Red blood cell counting is one of the most requested blood tests and can be effectively done by the dedicated equipment. In this paper, we proposed the two-stage circular Hough transform as the alternative automatic method for canine red blood cell counting. The possible blood cell area in the input slide image is first extracted. In the first stage, the Circular Hough transform with low sensitivity is applied to detect the non-overlapped cells. The detected cells are removed. The Circular Hough transform with high sensitivity is re-applied to the remaining region in order to detect the overlapped cells. The proposed method can be easily implemented into personal computers. The proposed algorithm was tested with many slides of canine red blood cell. It provided the counting with the average error of less than 5% with the best result of 1.439% error.