Semi-automatic segmentation of skin lesions based on superpixels and hybrid texture information

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2022-04

Authors

Elineide S. dos Santos (Author) Other; Rodrigo de M. S. Veras (Author) Other; Kelson R. T. Aires (Author) Other; Helano M. B. F. Portela (Author) Other; Geraldo Braz Junior (Author) Other; Justino D. Santos (Author) Other; João Manuel R. S. Tavares (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: Medical Image Analysis

Vol. 77 No. 102363

Pages: 1-12

ISSN: 1361-8415

Publisher: Elsevier

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 0 Citations

ISI Web of Science

Scientific classification

CORDIS: Technological sciences

FOS: Medical and Health sciences

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00W-MD6

DOI: 10.1016/j.media.2022.102363

Abstract (EN): Dermoscopic images are commonly used in the early diagnosis of skin lesions, and several computational systems have been proposed to analyze them. The segmentation of the lesions is a fundamental step in many of these systems. Therefore, a semi-automatic segmentation method is proposed here, which begins by building the superpixels of the image under analysis based on the zero parameter version of the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC0) algorithm. Then, each superpixel is represented using a descriptor built by combining the grey-level co-occurrence matrix and Tamura texture features. Afterward, the gain ratios of the features are used to select the input for the semi-supervised seeded fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm. Hence, from a few specialist-selected superpixels, this clustering algorithm groups the built superpixels into lesion or background regions. Finally, the segmented image undergoes a post processing step to eliminate sharp edges. The experiments were performed on 1380 images: 401 images from the PH2 and DermIS datasets, which were used to establish the parameters of the method, and 3,573 images from the ISIC 2016, ISIC 2017 and ISIC 2018 datasets were used for the analysis of the method's performance. The findings suggest that, by manually identifying just a few of the generated superpixels, the method can achieve an average segmentation accuracy of 96.78%, which confirms its superiority to the ones in the literature.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 12