Unified approach for lesion border detection based on mixture modeling and local entropy thresholding

<jats:sec><jats:title>Background/Purpose</jats:title><jats:p>Computer‐aided design (<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">CAD</jats:styled-content>) methods are highly valuable for the analysis of skin lesions using digital dermoscopy due to low rate of diagnostic accuracy of expert dermatologist. In computerized diagnostic methods, automatic border detection is the first and crucial step.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Method</jats:title><jats:p>In this study, a novel unified approach is proposed for automatic border detection (<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">ABD</jats:styled-content>). A preprocessing step is performed by normalized smoothing filter (<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">NSF</jats:styled-content>) to reduce background noise. Mixture models technique is then utilized to initially segment the lesion area roughly. Afterward, local entropy thresholding is performed to extract the lesion candidate pixels and the lesion border is smoothed using morphological reconstruction.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Results</jats:title><jats:p>The overall<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">ABD</jats:styled-content>system is tested on a set of 100 dermoscopy images with ground truth. A comparative study was conducted with the other three state‐of‐the‐art methods using statistical metrics. This<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">ABD</jats:styled-content>technique has the minimal average error probability rate of 5%, true detection of 92.10% and false positive rate of 6.41%.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Conclusion</jats:title><jats:p>Results demonstrate that the proposed method segments the lesion area accurately. Sample dataset and execute software are available online and can be downloaded from:<jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="http://cs.ntu.edu.pk/research">http://cs.ntu.edu.pk/research</jats:ext-link>.</jats:p></jats:sec>