Patent ID: 7720272

Claim:
A device for automatically identifying sperm cells in a smear located on a microscope slide, comprising: a digital camera operably coupled to a microscope capturing a first digital color image within an area of interest on the microscope slide; a computer processor operably coupled to the digital camera and having computer-executable instructions stored in memory thereon, the computer-executable instructions to be executed by the processor from the memory to: split the first digital color image into a plurality of component color space images and store the component color space images into a plurality of memory spaces; manipulate the component color space images by mathematical functions, logical functions or a combination of mathematical and logical functions to produce a result image; threshold the result image to create a binary result image; processing the binary result image with particle (blob) analysis; identify probable sperm cells by applying a set of blob factors; create a list of universal coordinate system positions of the probable sperm cells; select the plurality of individual component color space images to include at least two images selected from a group consisting of: a Red component color space image; a Green component color space image; a Blue component color space image; a Hue component color space image; a Saturation component color space image; an Intensity component color space image; a Cyan component color space image; a Magenta component color space image; a Yellow component color space image; and a Black component color space image; and use the mathematical or logical function to at least subtract the Red component color space image from the Green component color space image to produce a result image to identify the sperm cells.