  This paper presents an effective color normalization method for thin blood
film images of peripheral blood specimens. Thin blood film images can easily be
separated to foreground (cell) and background (plasma) parts. The color of the
plasma region is used to estimate and reduce the differences arising from
different illumination conditions. A second stage normalization based on the
database-gray world algorithm transforms the color of the foreground objects to
match a reference color character. The quantitative experiments demonstrate the
effectiveness of the method and its advantages against two other general
purpose color correction methods: simple gray world and Retinex.
