A Fast and Effective System for Detection of Neonatal Jaundice with a Dynamic Threshold White Balance Algorithm

Healthcare (Basel). 2021 Aug 16;9(8):1052. doi: 10.3390/healthcare9081052.

Abstract

Neonatal jaundice is caused by high levels of bilirubin in the body, which most commonly appears within three days of birth among newborns. Neonatal jaundice detection systems can take pictures in different places and upload them to the system for judgment. However, the white balance problem of the images is often encountered in these detection systems. The color shift images induced by different light haloes will result in the system causing errors in judging the images. The true color of images is very important information when the detection system judges the jaundice value. At present, most systems adopt specific assumption methods and rely on color charts to adjust images. In this study, we propose a novel white balance method with dynamic threshold to screen appropriate feature factors at different color temperatures iteratively and make the adjustment results of different images close to the same. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves superior results in comparison with several traditional approaches.

Keywords: a detection algorithm; automatic white balance; dynamic threshold; neonatal jaundice detection.