Improved bag-of-features using grey relational analysis for classification of histology images

An efficient classification method to categorize histopathological images is a challenging research problem. In this paper, an improved bag-of-features approach is presented as an efficient image classification method. In bag-of-features, a large number of keypoints are extracted from histopathological images that increases the computational cost of the codebook construction step. Therefore, to select the a relevant subset of keypoints, a new keypoints selection method is introduced in the bag-of-features method. To validate the performance of the proposed method, an extensive experimental analysis is conducted on two standard histopathological image datasets, namely ADL and Blue histology datasets. The proposed keypoint selection method reduces the extracted high dimensional features by 95% and 68% from the ADL and Blue histology datasets respectively with less computational time. Moreover, the enhanced bag-of-features method increases classification accuracy by from other considered classification methods.