Automatic segmentation of dermoscopy images using saliency combined with adaptive thresholding based on wavelet transform

Abstract

Segmentation is the essential requirement in automated computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of skin diseases. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised skin lesion segmentation method to challenge the difficulties existing in the dermoscopy images such as low contrast, border indistinct, and skin lesion is close to the boundary. The proposed method combines the enhanced fusion saliency with adaptive thresholding based on wavelet transform to get the lesion regions. Firstly, a fusion saliency map increases the contract of the skin lesion and healthy skin, and then an adaptive thresholding method based on wavelet transform is used to obtain more accurate lesion regions. We compare the proposed method with seven state-of-the-art approaches using a series of evaluation metrics on both PH2 and ISBI2016 datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method superior to the state-of-the-art approaches in accordance with quantitative results and visual effects.