Hair enhancement in dermoscopic images using dual-channel quaternion tubularness filters and MRF-based multilabel optimization

IEEE Trans Image Process. 2014 Dec;23(12):5486-96. doi: 10.1109/TIP.2014.2362054.

Abstract

Hair occlusion is one of the main challenges facing automatic lesion segmentation and feature extraction for skin cancer applications. We propose a novel method for simultaneously enhancing both light and dark hairs with variable widths, from dermoscopic images, without the prior knowledge of the hair color. We measure hair tubularness using a quaternion color curvature filter. We extract optimal hair features (tubularness, scale, and orientation) using Markov random field theory and multilabel optimization. We also develop a novel dual-channel matched filter to enhance hair pixels in the dermoscopic images while suppressing irrelevant skin pixels. We evaluate the hair enhancement capabilities of our method on hair-occluded images generated via our new hair simulation algorithm. Since hair enhancement is an intermediate step in a computer-aided diagnosis system for analyzing dermoscopic images, we validate our method and compare it to other methods by studying its effect on: 1) hair segmentation accuracy; 2) image inpainting quality; and 3) image classification accuracy. The validation results on 40 real clinical dermoscopic images and 94 synthetic data demonstrate that our approach outperforms competing hair enhancement methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Dermoscopy / methods*
  • Hair / anatomy & histology*
  • Humans
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Markov Chains
  • Melanoma / diagnosis
  • Skin Neoplasms / diagnosis