Segmentation of skin cancer images

An automatic method for segmentation of images of skin cancer and other pig mented lesions is presented. This method first reduces a color image into a n intensity image and approximately segments the image by intensity thresho lding. Then, it refines the segmentation using image edges. Double threshol ding is used to focus on an image area where a lesion boundary potentially exists. Image edges are then used to localize the boundary in that area. A closed elastic curve is fitted to the initial boundary, and is locally shru nk or expanded to approximate edges in its neighborhood in the area of focu s. Segmentation results from 20 randomly selected images show an average er ror that is about the same as that obtained by four experts manually segmen ting the images. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.