A novel and effective multistage classification system for microscopic starch grain images

Abstract

This article presents a novel and effective multistage system for classifying Chinese Materia Medica microscopic starch grain images. The proposed classification system is constructed based on the Gaussian mixture model-based clustering, the feature assignment algorithm, and the similarity measurement. Several features for each starch grain image are extracted and every class of drug is represented by a set of characteristic features. For each stage of the system, only one feature is chosen and assigned to that stage via the feature assignment algorithm, and the corresponding characteristic features are subdivided into smaller subsets based on clustering techniques. At the final stage, each subset contains a certain class of drugs (with corresponding characteristic features) and similarity measurement is carried out for starch grain classification. Three sets of the current state-of-the-art starch grain features including the granulometric size distribution, the chord length distribution, and the wavelet signature are used to construct the system. Experimental results on a database of 240 images of 24 classes of drugs reveal the superior performance of the multistage system. Comparison with the traditional starch grain classification approaches indicates that our proposed multistage method produces a marked improvement in classification performance.

Starch granules identification and automatic classification based on an extended set of morphometric and optical measurements

“…as in Torrence et al (2004), or optical features (e.g. chord length distribution) as in Choy et al (2009), who obtained relatively good results. We observed, however, that although the addition of new characters does increase the rates of identification, these tend to stabilize at a plateau (Fig.…”

“…They obtained rates of accuracy of 62% on average (lower than Torrence et al, 2004) despite the fact that their dataset included a smaller number of species. Other studies used different optical and morphological characters but with such a limited number of granules that it is unlikely that starch granule variability could properly be taken into account (Choy et al, 2009;Fernández Pierna et al, 2005). A successful method based on morphological and optical characters of identification (focused on granule outline) developed by Coster and Field (2015) classified accurately (85.9%) 84-165 starch granules from 8 species.…”