Deep CNNs for HEp-2 Cells Classification : A Cross-specimen Analysis

Automatic classification of Human Epithelial Type-2 (HEp-2) cells staining patterns is an important and yet a challenging problem. Although both shallow and deep methods have been applied, the study of deep convolutional networks (CNNs) on this topic is shallow to date, thus failed to claim its top position for this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel study of using CNNs for HEp-2 cells classification focusing on cross-specimen analysis, a key evaluation for generalization. For the first time, our study reveals several key factors of using CNNs for HEp-2 cells classification. Our proposed system achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy on public benchmark dataset. Comparative experiments on different training data reveals that adding different specimens,rather than increasing in numbers by affine transformations, helps to train a good deep model. This opens a new avenue for adopting deep CNNs to HEp-2 cells classification.