Saliency-based segmentation of dermoscopic images using colour information

Abstract

ABSTRACT Skin lesion segmentation is one of the crucial steps for an efficient non-invasive computer-aided early diagnosis of melanoma. This paper investigates how to use colour information, besides saliency, for determining the pigmented lesion region automatically. Unlike most existing segmentation methods using only the saliency to discriminate against the skin lesion from the surrounding regions, we propose a novel method employing a binarization process coupled with new perceptual criteria, inspired by the human visual perception, related to the properties of saliency and colour of the input image data distribution. As a means of refining the accuracy of the proposed method, the segmentation step is preceded by a pre-processing aimed at reducing the computation burden, removing artefacts, and improving contrast. We have assessed the method on two public databases, including 1497 dermoscopic images. We have also compared its performance with classical and recent saliency-based methods designed explicitly for dermoscopic images. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation indicates that the proposed method is promising since it produces an accurate skin lesion segmentation and performs satisfactorily compared to other existing saliency-based segmentation methods.