An attention framework based on multiple color spaces for artifact classification in whole slide images

Computational pathology models are sensitive to artifacts arising from tissue preparation and whole-slide imaging. Common artifacts-including tissue folds, uneven staining, ink markings, blur, and contamination-alter both structural and chromatic characteristics of histopathological images, adversely affecting model reliability. To address this, we present AC-AttnNet, a multi-color-space network for robust artifact classification. Input images are transformed into RGB (Red-Green-Blue), HSV (Hue-Saturation-Value), HED (via hematoxylin-eosin deconvolution), and CIELAB (L*a*b*) color spaces, from which features are extracted using attention-enhanced residual blocks. A cross-color attention module (CCAM) models inter-space feature dependencies through sample-adaptive4×4attention matrices, enabling dynamic fusion of color-domain representations. AC-AttnNet achieves a multi-seed mean test accuracy of97.91±0.16% (best single run: 97.96%) and 99.10% validation accuracy on a breast histopathology artifact dataset with only 7.7 M parameters and 1.58G FLOPs. Cross-dataset evaluation demonstrates strong generalization with an average accuracy of 87.3%, outperforming AR-Classifier (81.1%) and ResNet-50 (76.7%). Ablation studies confirm that multi-color-space modeling improves accuracy by +0.72% over the RGB-only baseline, and CCAM fusion yields modest but consistent gains over static concatenation across seeds (+0.08% mean improvement), with stronger qualitative support from t-SNE silhouette improvement and Grad-CAM focus. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-color feature interaction for artifact classification and support the use of AC-AttnNet as a reliable component in computational pathology quality control and restoration pipelines.