Histogram non-linear transform for sperm cells image detection enhancement

Proper recognition of microscopic sperm cells in video images is an important step in diagnosis and treatment of male infertility. The small sizes of the sperm cells make their segmentation and detection an important stage in the microscopic images analysis. Histogram-based thresholding schemes are one of the common approaches for this purpose. This paper proposes a non-linear amplitude compression transform method applied as a pre-processing stage for histogram-based thresholding algorithms. The results of conducted experiments verify the higher performance of the proposed scheme when used with Kittler method compared to its utilization with the other competitive algorithms in most cases for this application.