Quantification of parasitaemia is an important part of a microscopic malaria diagnosis. Giemsastained thin blood smear is the gold standard method for detecting malaria parasite enumeration. However, manual counting reveals the limitations of human inconsistency and fatigue, as well as the unreliability of accuracy and non-reproducibility. In this paper, the texture-based classification approach is investigated. The methods consist of the following processes: pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction and the classification of erythrocytes. The preprocessing is applied for image conversion and enhancement. The segmentation combines local adaptive thresholding, morphological process and watershed transform to extract red blood cells, separate touching and overlapping cells. Texture analysis is performed to establish parameters obtained from first-order, second-order and higher-order statistical analysis and wavelet transform. Two feature selection approaches, the sequential forward selection method and sequential backward selection method, integrated with a support vector machine classifier are examined to obtain the optimal feature set for identifying the Plasmodium falciparum stages. We found that graylevel co-occurrence matrices based textural features were highly selected. The proposed method produces 98.87% accuracy for binary classification, 99.56% accuracy for ring stage classification, and 99.48% accuracy for tropozoite stage classification.
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