Bioimage classification with subcategory discriminant transform of high dimensional visual descriptors

Background Bioimage classification is a fundamental problem for many important biological studies that require accurate cell phenotype recognition, subcellular localization, and histopathological classification. In this paper, we present a new bioimage classification method that can be generally applicable to a wide variety of classification problems. We propose to use a high-dimensional multi-modal descriptor that combines multiple texture features. We also design a novel subcategory discriminant transform (SDT) algorithm to further enhance the discriminative power of descriptors by learning convolution kernels to reduce the within-class variation and increase the between-class difference. Results We evaluate our method on eight different bioimage classification tasks using the publicly available IICBU 2008 database. Each task comprises a separate dataset, and the collection represents typical subcellular, cellular, and tissue level classification problems. Our method demonstrates improved classification accuracy (0.9 to 9%) on six tasks when compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We also find that SDT outperforms the well-known dimension reduction techniques, with for example 0.2 to 13% improvement over linear discriminant analysis. Conclusions We present a general bioimage classification method, which comprises a highly descriptive visual feature representation and a learning-based discriminative feature transformation algorithm. Our evaluation on the IICBU 2008 database demonstrates improved performance over the state-of-the-art for six different classification tasks.