Co-occurrence histogram based ensemble of classifiers for classification of cervical cancer cells

Abstract

To explore the potential of conventional image processing techniques in the classification of cervical cancer cells, in this work, a co-occurrence histogram method was employed for image feature extraction and an ensemble classifier was developed by combining the base classifiers, namely, the artificial neural network (ANN), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM), for image classification. The segmented pap-smear cell image dataset was constructed by the k-means clustering technique and used to evaluate the performance of the ensemble classifier which was formed by the combination of the above considered base classifiers. The result was also compared with that achieved by the individual base classifiers as well as that trained with color, texture, and shape features. The maximum average classification accuracy of 93.44% was obtained when the ensemble classifier was applied and trained with co-occurrence histogram features, which indicates that the ensemble classifier trained with the co-occurrence histogram features is more suitable for the classification of cervical cancer cells.