Medical image processing of thermal images in light of applied color palettes

Abstract

The choice of colour palette in image processing of medical thermal images plays a crucial role and it essentially affects the interpretation and visualization of the thermal image. Even though it has remained a subject of criticism due to the difference of visualization as compared to the grayscale colour palette, the rainbow palette has been widely applied in medical image processing of thermal images. In this work, the rainbow colour palette and the grayscale colour palette were applied on the medical thermal images representing skin conditions and a comparative study was performed to assess their applicability and performance in the methodology applied. It is observed that both the palettes are suitable at different stages as part of methodology to study medical thermal images. Using the global thresholding techniques for foreground detection, the grayscale palette was found useful for image segmentation into background and foreground while the rainbow palette is effective when colour-based clustering is performed to segregate the object of interest into varying temperature zones.