Automatic detection of blue-whitish veil as the primary dermoscopic feature

Abstract

Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Owing to the difficulty and subjectivity of human interpretation, dermoscopy image analysis has become an important research area. One of the most important local structure that is likely to appear in malignant melanoma is the blue-whitish veil. In this article, we present an unsupervised approach to the blue-whitish veil detection in dermoscopy images of pigmented skin lesions based on the analysis of HSV color space. The method is tested on a set of 179 dermoscopy images and the detection error rate is lower than 15%. The results demonstrate that the presented method achieves both fast and accurate blue structure segmentation in dermoscopy images.