Color separation for discrimination in pattern recognition systems

Claim 1

A pattern recognition system for use in distinguishing white blood cells in a whole blood smear comprising means for scanning a field in said whole blood smear, said means for scanning generating light in accordance with the color of said images in said field, quantization means for generating binary signals representative of the positions of said field scanned, storage means responsive to said quantization means for serially shifting and storing said binary quantization, and pattern recognition means connected to said storage means for analyzing the binary quantization of said field for distinguishing the pattern scanned in said field wherein the improvement comprises color separation means for receiving said generated light from said means for scanning, said color separation means including filtering means for transmitting from said light in said field light only in a predetermined plurality of portions of the light spectrum, means responsive to said filtering means for providing a plurality of electrical signals, each of which varies in accordance with the light intensity in one of said portions of the light spectrum, said means responsive to said filtering means including means for removing from said plurality of electrical signals essentially all of said signals representative of a red cell, said means responsive for generating a resulting signal which is connected to said quantization means, said quantization means receiving said resulting electrical signal and for providing the binary quantization thereof for each position of the field scanned, said binary quantization of said field including white cell information and an insubstantial portion of red cell information so that red cell information is not analyzed during analysis of said binary quantization.