Histopathological image classification through discriminative feature learning and mutual information-based multi-channel joint sparse representation

Histopathological image classification is a very challenging task because of the biological heterogeneities and rich geometrical structures. In this paper, we propose a novel histopathological image classification framework, which includes the discriminative feature learning and the mutual information-based multi-channel joint sparse representation. We first propose a stack-based discriminative prediction sparse decomposition (SDPSD) model by incorporating the class labels information to predict deep discriminant features automatically. Subsequently, a mutual information-based multi-channel joint sparse model (MIMCJSM) is presented to jointly encode the common component and particular components of the discriminative features. Especially, the main advantage of the MIMCJSM is the construction of a joint dictionary using a mutual information criterion, which contains a common sub-dictionary and three particular sub-dictionaries. Based on the joint dictionary, the MIMCJSM captures the relationship of multi-channel features, which can improve discriminative ability of joint sparse representation coefficients. Finally, the joint sparse representation coefficients of different levels can be aggregated using the spatial pyramid matching (SPM) model, and the linear support vector machine (SVM) is used as the classifier. Experimental results on ADL and BreaKHis datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework consistently performs better than popular existing classification frameworks. Additionally, it can show promising strong-robustness performance for histopathological image classification.