SIFT texture description for understanding breast ultrasound images

Abstract

Texture is a powerful cue for describing structures that show a high degree of similarity in their image intensity patterns. This paper describes the use of Self-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), both as low-level and high-level descriptors, applied to differentiate the tissues present in breast US images. For the low-level texture descriptors case, SIFT descriptors are extracted from a regular grid. The high-level texture descriptor is build as a Bag-of-Features (BoF) of SIFT descriptors. Experimental results are provided showing the validity of the proposed approach for describing the tissues in breast US images. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.