Appearance Normalization of Histology Slides

This paper presents a method for automatic color and intensity normalization of digitized histology slides stained with two different agents. In comparison to previous approaches, prior information on the stain vectors is used in the estimation process, resulting in improved stability of the estimates. Due to the prevalence of hematoxylin and eosin staining for histology slides, the proposed method has significant practical utility. In particular, it can be used as a first step to standardize appearances across slides, that is very effective at countering effects due to differing stain amounts and protocols, and to slide fading. The approach is validated using synthetic experiments and 13 real datasets.