Classifying Hep-2 Cells In Immunofluorescence Images Using Multiple Kernel Learning

Indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) imaging is an important technique for detecting antinuclear antibodies in HEp-2 cells and therefore employed in the diagnosis of autoimmune diseases and other important pathological conditions involving the immune system. Here, HEp-2 cells are categorised into different groups, which allow to make implications about different autoimmune diseases. Traditionally, this categorisation is performed manually by an expert and is hence both subjective and time intensive. In this paper, we present an effective method for classification of HEp-2 cells in which we first extract local binary pattern (LBP) texture features in form of multi-dimensional LBP (MD-LBP) histograms and then employ a multiple kernel learning approach to classification that integrates a multitude of support vector kernels generated by sampling the feature space. We evaluate our algorithm on the ICPR 2012 HEp-2 contest benchmark dataset, and demonstrate that our employed texture features are indeed useful for the differentiation of HEp-2 cells and that our multiple kernel learning based classification approach outperforms single kernel classification schemes. Our algorithm is shown to provide super performance compared to all techniques that were entered in the competition and to rival results obtained by a human expert.