Using combination of color, texture, and shape features for image retrieval in melanomas databases

This paper deals with Computer Aided Diagnosis for skin cancers (melanomas). The diagnosis is based on some rules called the ABCD mnemonics. They take into account color distribution, lesion's diameter, etc. The goal isn't to classify the lesion but to find those, which are the most similar, in order to help the expert to confirm his diagnosis and to avoid any useless excision. This is done thanks to an indexation system, which compare the signatures of previously diagnosed lesions contained in a database and patient's lesion signature. This last is constructed by translating the rules into image processing attributes. We have divided then into three families: Color attributes (color and fuzzy histograms), Texture attributes (co-occurrence matrix and Haralick indices) and Shape attributes (lesion surface and maximum included circle). Image quantization permits us to keep only the most significant colors, thus giving a light structure. Finally, we define a distance for each attribute and use weighted combination for the similarity measure.