Lorenzo Ginori, Juan ValentínMeneses Marcel, AlfredoMollineda Diogo, NiurkaOrozco Morales, RubénSifontes Rodríguez, SergioChinea Valdés, LyanettIzquierdo Torres, YanelaUniversidad Central "Marta Abreu" de Las Villas. Centro de Bioactivos Químicos,2022-02-172022-02-172019-11https://dspace.uclv.edu.cu/handle/123456789/13436The development of antimalarial drugs requires performing laboratory experiments that include the analysis of blood smears infected with Plasmodium berghei. Analyzing visually the resulting microscopy images is usually a slow and tedious task prone to errors due to fatigue and subjectivity of the analysts. These facts motivated the creation of digital image processing systems to automate the aforementioned analysis. We present in this work a computer vision solution which processes microscopy images of blood smears. This system performs tasks like illumination correction, color compensation, image segmentation including separation of clumped objects and the extraction and selection of color features. Then a set of classifiers was tested to find the best one in terms of classification results. Here a new feature named pixels fraction was introduced and a number of other color features were extracted, from which a subset was selected for the classification of the cells into either normal or infected. The classifiers tested for this application were: support vector machines (SVM), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), J48, Random Forest (RF), Naïve Bayes and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). All of them were evaluated in terms of their performance expressed as correct classification rate, sensitivity, specificity, F-measure and area under Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). The usefulness of the pixels fraction as a new and effective feature was demonstrated by the experimental results. In regard of classifiers, J48 and Random Forest showed the best results.en-USMalariaImage processingComputer visionFeature extractionArticle10.1007/978-3-030-13469-3_83