A Novel Iterative Method for Automatic Avian Red Blood Cell Counting

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.