Segmenting Reddish Lesions in Capsule Endoscopy Images Using a Gastrointestinal Color Space

Segmenting reddish lesions in capsule endoscopy (CE) images is an initial step for further computer-assisted applications such as image enhancement, abnormal measurement/tracking, and so on. In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation method that is successful even with CE image including unclear reddish lesions. To obtain this, the proposed method seeks good features to discriminate the reddish lesions from normal tissues. For implementations, we first extract only meaningful regions in a CE image through a pre-segmentation step. The proposed features then are extracted for the meaningful regions in stead of the whole image. We approaches segmentation task through considering a statistical operator for the extracted features, that is local mean image. Candidates of the abnormal regions are located in the local mean image with assistants of a diffusion process. Evaluations in the experiments confirm effectiveness of the proposed method with both qualitative and quantitative measurement.