Complex objects classified by morphological shape analysis and elliptical Fourier descriptors

This chapter deals with the classification of complex objects by morphological shape analysis and elliptical Fourier descriptors. An unsupervised method has been proposed to identify components with specific shapes by a simple edge detector and to classify them via the description of their contours. A particular application has been arranged in order to evaluate the goodness of this approach when discriminating between normal and pathological human megakaryocytes. Alterations in these cells can occur in many pathological processes and in such cases the pattern, size and shape of the cytoplasm and/or of the nucleus are extremely varied.