Estimation of Illumination Map from Dermoscopy Images for Extracting Differential Structures Using Gabor Local Mesh Patterns

摘要

Melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer and its incidence rate is significantly increasing. The design of an assisted diagnosis system for the detection of melanoma is a challenging task involving various steps related to computer vision. Researchers have concluded that the accurate identification of melanoma requires robust preprocessing steps on dermoscopy images including hair removal, illumination correction etc., that can help in a better detection of melanoma. In this paper, we propose a novel illumination correction algorithm followed by robust feature extraction from dermoscopy images, leading to a better identification of cancer. Illumination correction is based on statistical estimation of illumination content in the images, followed by the extraction of differential structures using a combination of Gabor filtering followed by extracting local mesh patterns, which exhibit physiological significance based on various clinical rules for detecting melanoma. Our experiments show that the proposed technique outperforms all the other methods that have been considered in this paper.