CLASSIFICATION OF A POPULATION OF OBJECTS BY CONVOLUTIONAL DICTIONARY LEARNING WITH CLASS PROPORTION DATA

A method is disclosed for classifying and/or counting objects (for example, cells) in an image that contains a mixture of several types of objects. Prior statistical information about the object mixtures (class proportion data) is used to improve classification results. The present technique may use a generative model for images containing mixtures of object types to derive a method for classifying and/or counting cells utilizing both class proportion data and classified object templates. The generative model describes an image as the sum of many images with a single cell, where the class of each cell is selected from some statistical distribution. Embodiments of the present techniques have been successfully used to classify white blood cells in images of lysed blood from both normal and abnormal blood donors.