The problem of identifying and counting blood cells within the blood smear is of both theoretical and practical interest. The differential counting of blood cells provides invaluable information to pathologist for diagnosis and treatment of many diseases. In this paper we propose an efficient hierarchical blood cell image identification and classification method based on multi-class support vector machine. In this automated process, segmentation and classification of blood cells are the most important stages. We segment the stained blood cells in digital microscopic images and extract the geometric features for each segment to identify and classify the different types of blood cells. The experimental results are compared with the manual results obtained by the pathologist, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.