Skin Cancer Image Segmentation Based on Midpoint Analysis Approach

Abstract

Skin cancer affects people of all ages and is a common disease. The death toll from skin cancer rises with a late diagnosis. An automated mechanism for early-stage skin cancer detection is required to diminish the mortality rate. Visual examination with scanning or imaging screening is a common mechanism for detecting this disease, but due to its similarity to other diseases, this mechanism shows the least accuracy. This article introduces an innovative segmentation mechanism that operates on the ISIC dataset to divide skin images into critical and non-critical sections. The main objective of the research is to segment lesions from dermoscopic skin images. The suggested framework is completed in two steps. The first step is to pre-process the image; for this, we have applied a bottom hat filter for hair removal and image enhancement by applying DCT and color coefficient. In the next phase, a background subtraction method with midpoint analysis is applied for segmentation to extract the region of interest and achieves an accuracy of 95.30%. The ground truth for the validation of segmentation is accomplished by comparing the segmented images with validation data provided with the ISIC dataset.

Keywords: Background subtraction; Hair removal; Image enhancement; Segmentation; Skin cancer.