DETECTION OF SKIN TUMOR BOUNDARIES IN COLOR IMAGES

Boundary detection has been recognized as one of the difficult problem s in image processing and pattern analysis, in particular in medical i maging applications. There is no unified approach to this problem, whi ch has been found to be application-dependent. In this paper, we prese nt a simple and yet effective method to find the borders of tumors as an initial step towards the diagnosis of skin tumors from their color images. The method makes use of an adaptive color metric from the red, green, and blue (RGB) planes that contain information to discriminate the tumor from the background. Using this suitable coordinate transfo rmation, the image is segmented. The tumor portion is then extracted f rom the segmented image and borders are drawn. Experimental results th at verify the effectiveness of this approach are given.