Localization of lesions in dermoscopy images using ensembles of thresholding methods

Abstract

Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty and subjectivity of human interpretation, automated analysis of dermoscopy images has become an important research area. Border detection is often the first step in this analysis. In this article, we present an approximate lesion localization method that serves as a preprocessing step for detecting borders in dermoscopy images. In this method, first the black frame around the image is removed using an iterative algorithm. The approximate location of the lesion is then determined using an ensemble of thresholding algorithms. Experiments on a large set of images demonstrate that the presented method achieves both fast and accurate localization of lesions in dermoscopy images. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.