DULLRAZOR(R) - A SOFTWARE APPROACH TO HAIR REMOVAL FROM IMAGES

Recently, there has been a growing number of studies applying image pr ocessing techniques to analyze melanocytic lesions for atypia and poss ible malignancy and for total-body mole mapping. However, such lesions can be partially obscured by body hairs. None of these studies has fu lly addressed the problem of human hairs occluding the imaged lesions. In our previous study we designed an automatic segmentation program t o differentiate skin lesions from the normal healthy skin, and learned that the program performed well with most of the images, the exceptio n being those with hairs, especially dark thick hairs, covering part o f the lesions. These thick dark hairs confused the program, resulting in unsatisfactory segmentation results. In this paper, we present a me thod to remove hairs from an image using a pre-processing program we h ave called DullRazor(R). This pre-processing step enables the segmenta tion program to achieve satisfactory results. DullRazor(R) can be down loaded as shareware from http://www.derm.ubc.ca. (C) 1997 Elsevier Sci ence Ltd.