Recognition of Optical Microscopy Images Based on Shape and Texture

Airborne pollen is the main cause of pollen allergy, so statistic of the amount and distribution of pollen in the air is important. This paper presents a method to identify airborne pollen grains in optical microscopy images. After pollen region is segmented by thresholding, global shape descriptor and Fourier descriptor are used to extract shape features, gray level co-occurrence matrix is employed to extract texture features, and finally pollen grains are classified by a k-nearest neighborhood classifier. In the experiment with 55 cases ofPoaceae, 44 cases ofMoraceaeand 48 cases ofPinaceae, a classification rate of 82.31% can be obtained with an accuracy of 85.45%, 61.36%, and 97.91% for each family.