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Broiler is among Thai major industries. Red blood cell (RBC) count is one of the basic health screening protocols. The counting is often done manually. The mammalian blood analyzer cannot be used, because the shapes of mammalia and avian RBCs are different. RBC's color also varies among staining methods. Furthermore, RBCs can be grouped together. In this paper, we propose the automatic method for counting avian RBC. Otsu's multiple thresholding is used to extract the nucleus of RBC. The problems of the varying color of and the conglomerated RBC are tackled by applying iterative process. Only one parameter needs to be set manually. The experiment on five different staining types demonstrated that our proposed method provided less than 5% counting error for the staining that did not have the dark RBC's boundary.

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.