Segmentation of skin cancer images

An automatic method for segmentation of images of skin cancer and other pigmented lesions is presented. This method first reduces a color image into an intensity image and approximately segments the image by intensity thresholding. Then, it refines the segmentation using image edges. Double thresholding 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 shrunk or expanded to approximate edges in its neighborhood in the area of focus. Segmentation results from 20 randomly selected images show an average error that is about the same as that obtained by four experts manually segmenting the images.