Skin lesion segmentation using stochastic region-merging and pixel-based markov random field

Abstract

Markov random field (MRF) theory has achieved great success in image segmentation. Researchers have developed various methods based on MRF theory to solve skin lesions segmentation problems such as pixel-based MRF model, stochastic region-merging approach, symmetric MRF model, etc. In this paper, the proposed method seeks to provide a complement to the advantages of the pixel-based MRF model and stochastic region-merging approach. This is in order to overcome shortcomings of the pixel-based MRF model, because of various challenges that affect the skin lesion segmentation results such as irregular and fuzzy border, noisy and artifacts presence, and low contrast between lesions. The strength of the proposed method lies in the aspect of combining the benefits of the pixel-based MRF model and the stochastic region-merging by decomposing the likelihood function into the multiplication of stochastic region-merging likelihood function and the pixel likelihood function. The proposed method was evaluated on bench marked available datasets, PH2 and ISIC. The proposed method achieves Dice coefficients of 89.65% on PH2 and 88.34% on ISIC datasets respectively.