The objective of this work is to provide an automatic system to count white blood cells in a blood smear. To do so an experiment was assembled, composed by a standard microscope with two step motors coupled to its knobs in order to move the microscope in x and y directions and a web cam which was mounted in the top of the microscope responsible for to acquire images from the smear. The step motors and the web cam are controlled by a microcomputer PC standard via software developed in Delphi.

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... motors use the parallel port to communicate with the PC and the camera use the USB port. The main idea is to set an initial point into the smear and the automated system will carry over the smear acquiring images (frames with 640 × 480 pixels) and counting the white blood cells encountered. The double histogram threshold technique is implemented to initially exclude the red cells from the image leaving only the white ones. Preliminaries results are obtained and show that the system is quite fast and has a good capacity of selection, even when different kinds of smear are used.