IMPROVED CLASSIFICATION ROBUSTNESS FOR NOISY CELL IMAGES REPRESENTED AS PRINCIPAL-COMPONENT PROJECTIONS IN A HYBRID RECOGNITION SYSTEM

Different types of cells are recognized from their noisy images by use of a hybrid recognition system that consists of a learning principal- component analyzer and an image-classifier network. The inputs to the feed-forward backpropagation classifier are the first 15 principal com ponents of the 10 x 10 pixel image to be classified. The classifier wa s trained with clear images of cells in metaphase, unburst cells, and other erroneous patterns. Experimental results show that the recogniti on system is robust to image scaling and rotation, as well as to image noise. Cell recognition is demonstrated for images that are corrupted with additive Gaussian noise, impulse noise, and quantization errors. We compare the performance of the hybrid recognition system with that of a conventional three-layer feed-forward backpropagation network th at uses the raw image directly as input. (C) 1998 Optical Society of A merica.