Hemoglobin and melanin quantification on skin images

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and compare four different approaches for quantification of hemoglobin and melanin on skin color image. The first method is to extract erythema/melanin indices based on skin absorbance theories. The second method is based on independent component analysis (ICA) assuming that hemoglobin and melanin absorbance spectra are independent. The third method is proposed based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) with multiplicative update algorithm. Finally, we propose a model-fitting technique based on Beer-Lambert law. Quantitative evaluation through graph-cut segmentation on 30 melanoma lesions from 10 patients indicates that model-fitting method outperforms the other three methods. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.