A comparative study of algorithms for automatic segmentation of dermoscopic images

Melanoma is the most common as well as the most dangerous type of skin cancer. Nevertheless, it can be effectively treated if detected early. Dermoscopy is one of the major non-invasive imaging techniques for the diagnosis of skin lesions. The computer-aided diagnosis based on the processing of dermoscopic images aims to reduce the subjectivity and time-consuming analysis related to traditional diagnosis. The first step of automatic diagnosis is image segmentation. In this project, the implementation and evaluation of several methods were proposed for the automatic segmentation of lesion regions in dermoscopic images, along with the corresponding implemented phases for image preprocessing and postprocessing. The developed algorithms include methods based on different state of the art techniques. The main groups of techniques which have been selected to be studied and implemented are thresholding-based methods, region-based methods, segmentation based on deformable models, as well as a new proposed approach based on the bag-of-words model. The implemented methods incorporate modifications for a better adaptation to features associated with dermoscopic images. Each implemented method was applied to a database constituted by 724 dermoscopic images. The output of the automatic segmentation procedure for each image was compared with the corresponding manual segmentation in order to evaluate the performance. The comparison between algorithms was carried out regarding the obtained evaluation metrics. The best results were achieved by the combination of region-based segmentation based on the multi-region adaptation of the k-means algorithm and the subIngeniería de Sistemas Audiovisuale

Enhancement of Image Resolution by Binarization

Image segmentation is one of the principal approaches of image processing. The choice of the most appropriate Binarization algorithm for each case proved to be a very interesting procedure itself. In this paper, we have done the comparison study between the various algorithms based on Binarization algorithms and propose a methodologies for the validation of Binarization algorithms. In this work we have developed two novel algorithms to determine threshold values for the pixels value of the gray scale image. The performance estimation of the algorithm utilizes test images with, the evaluation metrics for Binarization of textual and synthetic images. We have achieved better resolution of the image by using the Binarization method of optimum thresholding techniques.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figure

Multilevel minimum cross entropy threshold selection based on particle swarm optimization

Abstract Thresholding is one of the popular and fundamental techniques for conducting image segmentation. Many thresholding techniques have been proposed in the literature. Among them, the minimum cross entropy thresholding (MCET) have been widely adopted. Although the MCET method is effective in the bilevel thresholding case, it could be very time-consuming in the multilevel thresholding scenario for more complex image analysis. This paper first presents a recursive programming technique which reduces an order of magnitude for computing the MCET objective function. Then, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed for searching the near-optimal MCET thresholds. The experimental results manifest that the proposed PSO-based algorithm can derive multiple MCET thresholds which are very close to the optimal ones examined by the exhaustive search method. The convergence of the proposed method is analyzed mathematically and the results validate that the proposed method is efficient and is suited for real-time applications

Multilevel Thresholding for Image Segmentation Using an Improved Electromagnetism Optimization Algorithm

Image segmentation is considered one of the most important tasks in image processing, which has several applications in different areas such as; industry agriculture, medicine, etc. In this paper, we develop the electromagnetic optimization (EMO) algorithm based on levy function, EMO-levy, to enhance the EMO performance for determining the optimal multi-level thresholding of image segmentation. In general, EMO simulates the mechanism of attraction and repulsion between charges to develop the individuals of a population. EMO takes random samples from search space within the histogram of image, where, each sample represents each particle in EMO. The quality of each particle is assessed based on Otsu’s or Kapur objective function value. The solutions are updated using EMO operators until determine the optimal objective functions. Finally, this approach produces segmented images with optimal values for the threshold and a few number of iterations. The proposed technique is validated using different standard test images. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm for image segmentation compared with well-known optimization methods

One-Dimensional Openings, Granulometries and Component Trees in O(1) Per Pixel

International audienceWe introduce a new, efficient and adaptable algorithm to compute openings, granulometries and the component tree for one-dimensional (1-D) signals. The algorithm requires only one scan of the signal, runs in place in per pixel, and supports any scalar data precision (integer or floating-point data). The algorithm is applied to two-dimensional images along straight lines, in arbitrary orientations. Oriented size distributions can thus be efficiently computed, and textures characterized. Extensive benchmarks are reported. They show that the proposed algorithm allows computing 1-D openings faster than existing algorithms for data precisions higher than 8 bits, and remains competitive with respect to the algorithm proposed by Van Droogenbroeck when dealing with 8-bit images. When computing granulometries, the new algorithm runs faster than any other method of the state of the art. Moreover, it allows efficient computation of 1-D component trees

Recognition of characters in document images using morphological operation

In this paper, we deal with the problem of document image rectification from image captured by digital cameras. The improvement on the resolution of digital camera sensors has brought more and more applications for non-contact text capture. It is widely used as a form of data entry from some sort of original paper data source, documents, sales receipts or any number of printed records. It is crucial to the computerization of printed texts so that they can be electronically searched, stored more compactly, displayed on-line, and used in machine processes such as machine translation, text-to-speech and text mining. Unfortunately, perspective distortion in the resulting image makes it hard to properly identify the contents of the captured text using traditional optical character recognition (OCR) systems. In this work we propose a new technique; it is a system that provides a full alphanumeric recognition of printed or handwritten characters at electronic speed by simply scanning the form. Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated as OCR is the mechanical or electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. OCR software detects and extracts each character in the text of a scanned image, and using the ASCII code set, which is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, converts it into a computer recognizable character. Once each character has been converted, the whole document is saved as an editable text document with a highest accuracy rate of 99.5 per cent, although it is not always this accurate. The basic idea of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is to classify optical patterns (often contained in a digital image) corresponding to alphanumeric or other characters

Interactive segmentation based on component-trees

International audienceComponent-trees associate to a discrete grey-level image a descriptive data structure induced by the inclusion relation between the binary components obtained at successive level-sets. This article presents an original interactive segmen- tation methodology based on component-trees. It consists of the extraction of a subset of the image component-tree, enabling the generation of a binary object which fits at best (with respect to the grey-level structure of the image) a given binary target selected beforehand in the image. A proof of the algorithmic efficiency of this methodological scheme is proposed. Concrete application examples on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data emphasise its actual computational efficiency and its usefulness for interactive segmentation of real images