The Classification of HEp-2 Cell Patterns Using Fractal Descriptor

Indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) with HEp-2 cells is considered as a powerful, sensitive and comprehensive technique for analyzing antinuclear autoantibodies (ANAs). The automatic classification of the HEp-2 cell images from IIF has played an important role in diagnosis. Fractal dimension can be used on the analysis of image representing and also on the property quantification like texture complexity and spatial occupation. In this study, we apply the fractal theory in the application of HEp-2 cell staining pattern classification, utilizing fractal descriptor firstly in the HEp-2 cell pattern classification with the help of morphological descriptor and pixel difference descriptor. The method is applied to the data set of MIVIA and uses the support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Experimental results show that the fractal descriptor combining with morphological descriptor and pixel difference descriptor makes the precisions of six patterns more stable, all above 50%, achieving 67.17% overall accuracy at best with relatively simple feature vectors.