Thermal Image Processing for Breast Symmetry Detection Oriented to Automatic Breast Cancer Analysis

摘要

The present work presents a methodology to automatically detect the symmetry point of breast. In order to achieve this goal, the algorithm corrects thermal image tilt to find a breast symmetry axis, compute a modified symmetric index that can be used as a measure of image quality, breast cosmetic and pathologic issues, and a seed location for a former algorithm reported to automatically achieve breast cancer analysis. The methodology involves filtering, edge detection, windowing edge analysis and shape detection based on the Hough transform. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to define the symmetry axis as precise as a person do, and correctly detected breast areas in 100% of the cases considered, allowing automatic breast analysis by a previous algorithm.