Automatic segmentation of dermoscopy images using saliency combined with Otsu threshold

作者：Fan, Haidi; Xie, Fengying^*; Li, Yang; Jian, Zhiguo; Liu, Jie

来源：Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2017, 85: 75-85.

DOI：10.1016/j.compbiomed.2017.03.025

• Automatic segmentation
• Computer-aided diagnosis
• Dermoscopy images
• Saliency
• Threshold

Segmentation is one of the crucial steps for the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of skin cancer with dermoscopy images. To accurately extract lesion borders from dermoscopy images, a novel automatic segmentation algorithm using saliency combined with Otsu threshold is proposed in this paper, which includes enhancement and segmentation stages. In the enhancement stage, prior information on healthy skin is extracted, and the color saliency map and brightness saliency map are constructed respectively. By fusing the two saliency maps, the final enhanced image is obtained. In the segmentation stage, according to the histogram distribution of the enhanced image, an optimization function is designed to adjust the traditional Otsu threshold method to obtain more accurate lesion borders. The proposed model is validated from enhancement effectiveness and segmentation accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is robust and performs better than other state-of-the-art methods.

• 出版日期2017-6-1
• 单位北京协和医学院; 北京航空航天大学; 中国医学科学院北京协和医院