Automated Digital Hair Removal by Threshold Decomposition and Morphological Analysis

We propose a method for digital hair removal from dermoscopic images, based on a threshold-set model. For every threshold, we adapt a recent gap-detection algorithm to find hairs, and merge results in a single mask image. We find hairs in this mask by combining morphological filters and medial descriptors. We derive robust parameter values for our method from over 300 skin images. We detail a GPU implementation of our method and show how it compares favorably with five existing hair removal methods.

[1]  Jitendra Malik,et al.  Scale-Space and Edge Detection Using Anisotropic Diffusion , 1990, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[2]  N. Altman.  An Introduction to Kernel and Nearest-Neighbor Nonparametric Regression , 1992 .

[3]  T Lee,et al.  Dullrazor®: A software approach to hair removal from images , 1997, Comput. Biol. Medicine.

[4]  Heung-Kyu Lee,et al.  Towards knowledge-based extraction of roads from 1 m-resolution satellite images , 2000, 4th IEEE Southwest Symposium on Image Analysis and Interpretation.

[5]  Guillermo Sapiro,et al.  Image inpainting , 2000, SIGGRAPH.

[6]  Gilles Bertrand,et al.  Topological operators for grayscale image processing , 2001, J. Electronic Imaging.

[7]  Alexandru Telea,et al.  An Augmented Fast Marching Method for Computing Skeletons and Centerlines , 2002, VisSym.

[8]  Philippe Schmid-Saugeona,et al.  Towards a computer-aided diagnosis system for pigmented skin lesions. , 2003, Computerized medical imaging and graphics : the official journal of the Computerized Medical Imaging Society.

[9]  Corinna Cortes,et al.  Support-Vector Networks , 1995, Machine Learning.

[10]  Robert Strzodka,et al.  Generalized distance transforms and skeletons in graphics hardware , 2004, VISSYM'04.

[11]  Alexandru Telea,et al.  An Image Inpainting Technique Based on the Fast Marching Method , 2004, J. Graphics, GPU, & Game Tools.

[12]  Patrick Pérez,et al.  Region filling and object removal by exemplar-based image inpainting , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[13]  Folkmar Bornemann,et al.  Fast Image Inpainting Based on Coherence Transport , 2007, Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision.

[14]  Masafumi Hagiwara,et al.  An improved Internet-based melanoma screening system with dermatologist-like tumor area extraction algorithm , 2008, Comput. Medical Imaging Graph..

[15]  M. Stella Atkins,et al.  Dermascopic hair disocclusion using inpainting , 2008, SPIE Medical Imaging.

[16]  Shi-Yin Qin,et al.  PDE-based unsupervised repair of hair-occluded information in dermoscopy images of melanoma , 2009, Comput. Medical Imaging Graph..

[17]  Zhong Linghui,et al.  Pre‐diagnostic digital imaging prediction model to discriminate between malignant melanoma and benign pigmented skin lesion , 2010, Skin research and technology : official journal of International Society for Bioengineering and the Skin (ISBS) [and] International Society for Digital Imaging of Skin (ISDIS) [and] International Society for Skin Imaging.

[18]  M. Stella Atkins,et al.  Segmentation of light and dark hair in dermoscopic images: a hybrid approach using a universal kernel , 2010, Medical Imaging.

[19]  Tiow Seng Tan,et al.  Parallel Banding Algorithm to compute exact distance transform with the GPU , 2010, I3D '10.

[20]  Qaisar Abbas,et al.  Hair removal methods: A comparative study for dermoscopy images , 2011, Biomed. Signal Process. Control..

[21]  Enoch Peserico,et al.  VirtualShave: Automated hair removal from digital dermatoscopic images , 2011, 2011 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[22]  Qaisar Abbas,et al.  Unsupervised skin lesions border detection via two-dimensional image analysis , 2011, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[23]  Ahmad R. Sharafat,et al.  E-shaver: An improved DullRazor® for digitally removing dark and light-colored hairs in dermoscopic images , 2011, Comput. Biol. Medicine.

[24]  Jocelyn Chanussot,et al.  Efficient Robust d-Dimensional Path Operators , 2012, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.

[25]  Adam Huang,et al.  A robust hair segmentation and removal approach for clinical images of skin lesions , 2013, 2013 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC).

[26]  Alexandru Telea,et al.  A Dense Medial Descriptor for Image Analysis , 2013, VISAPP.

[27]  Alexandru Telea,et al.  Gap-Sensitive Segmentation and Restoration of Digital Images , 2014, TPCG.

[28]  Sri Rahmawati Fitriatien.  Aplikasi jaringan syaraf tiruan Kohonen Self Organizing Maps dan Learning Vector Quantization pada data kualitas air kali Surabaya , 2015 .

[29]  K. Ming Leung,et al.  Learning Vector Quantization , 2017, Encyclopedia of Machine Learning and Data Mining.