An Efficient Block-Based Algorithm for Hair Removal in Dermoscopic Images

Hair occlusion in dermoscopy images affects the diagnostic operation of the skin lesion. Segmentation and classification of skin lesions are two major steps of the diagnostic operation required by Dermatologists. We propose a new algorithm for hair removal in dermoscopy images that includes two main stages: hair detection and inpainting. In hair detection, a morphological bottom-hat operation is implemented on Y-channel image of YIQ color space followed by a binarization operation. In inpainting, the repaired Y-channel is partitioned into 256 nonoverlapped blocks and for each block, white pixels are replaced by locating the highest peak of using a histogram function and a morphological close operation. Our proposed algorithm reports a true positive rate (sensitivity) of 97.36%, a false positive rate (fall-out) of 4.25%, and a true negative rate (specificity) of 95.75%. The diagnostic accuracy achieved is recorded at a high level of 95.78%

Diagnosis of Skin Lesions Based on Dermoscopic Images Using Image Processing Techniques

Great effort has been put into the development of diagnosis methods for the most dangerous type of skin diseases—melanoma. This paper aims to develop a prototype capable of segment and classify skin lesions in dermoscopy images based on ABCD rule. The proposed work is divided into four distinct stages: (1) pre-processing, consists of filtering and contrast enhancing techniques, (2) segmentation, thresholding, and statistical properties are computed to localize the lesion, (3) features extraction, asymmetry is calculated by averaging the calculated results of the two methods: entropy and bi-fold. Border irregularity is calculated by accumulate the statistical scores of the eight segments of the segmented lesion. Color feature is calculated among the existence of six candidate colors: white, black, red, light-brown, dark-brown, and blue-gray. Diameter is measured by the conversion operation from the total number of pixels in the greatest diameter into millimeter (mm), and (4) classification, the summation of the four extracted feature scores multiplied by their weights to yield a total dermoscopy score (TDS); hence, the lesion is classified into benign, suspicious, or malignant. The prototype is implemented in MATLAB and the dataset used consists of 200 dermoscopic images from Hospital Pedro Hispano, Matosinhos. The achieved results show an acceptable performance rates, an accuracy 90%, sensitivity 85%, and specificity 92.22%

Knowledge-based systems that determine the appropriate students major: In the faculty of engineering and information technology

In this paper a Knowledge-Based System (KBS) for determining the appropriate students major according to his/her preferences for sophomore student enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology in Al-Azhar University of Gaza was developed and tested. A set of predefined criterions that is taken into consideration before a sophomore student can select a major is outlined. Such criterion as high school score, score of subject such as Math I, Math II, Electrical Circuit I, and Electronics I taken during the student freshman year, number of credits passed, student cumulative grade point average of freshman year, among others, were then used as input data to KBS. KBS was designed and developed using Simpler Level Five (SL5) Object expert system language. KBS was tested on three generation of sophomore students from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology of the Al-Azhar University, Gaza. The results of the evaluation show that the KBS is able to correctly determine the appropriate students major without errors

HUMAN FACE DETECTION IN COLOR IMAGES

In this paper we have used a simple and efficient color-based approach to segment human skin pixels from background, using a 2D histogram-based approach as a preprocess stage for human face detection. For skin segmentation, a total of 446,007 skin samples from the training set is manually cropped from the RGB color images, to calculate three lookup tables based on the relationship between each pair of the triple components (R, G, B). Derivation of skin classifier rules from the lookup tables are based on how often each attribute value (interval) occurs, and their associated certainty values. For face detection, we assume the face-appearance as blob-like, and that the face has an approximately elliptical shape. Accordingly, an ellipse-fitting algorithm is appropriate, which is based on statistical moments, and those blobs that have an elliptical shape are retained as face candidates.Skin segmentation, histogram-based approach, lookup table, skin classifier, ellipse fitting, face detection, feature-based approach