In this work we propose an efficient approach to image segmentation for multispectral images of unstained blood films and automatic counting of erythrocytes. Our method takes advantage of Beer–Lambert’s law by using, first, a statistical standardisation equation applied to transmittance images, followed by the local adaptive threshold to detect the blood cells and hysteresis contour closing to obtain the complete blood cell boundaries, and finally the watershed algorithm is used. With this method, image pre-processing is not required, which leads to time savings. We obtained the following results that show that our technique is effective, efficient and fast: Precision of 98.47 % and Recall of 98.23 %, a degree of precision (F-Measurement) of 98.34 % and an Accuracy of 96.75 %.

Keywords: multispectral imaging, segmentation, malaria, automatic diagnosis, image analysis