Colour normalisation of histopathological images

Abstract

Colour transfer is a prime area of research in image processing in recent years. In many real-life image applications, colour transfer of the image is required. A few methods have been developed to alter the colour appearance of the images as per the colour information of the reference image. Histopathological image analysis is one of the application areas where colour transfer method can be used to reduce the effect of varying staining and illuminance. This paper proposes a hybrid method of colour normalisation using modified non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) and novel colour transfer method. The NMF method has been initialised using Lab colour space which provides fast and reliable results. Uncorrelated color space has been used to transfer the colour of target image to source image. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the considered existing methods and can successfully be applied for the colour normalisation of histopathological images.