Distance regularized curve evolution: A formulation using creaseness features for dermoscopic image segmentation

The traditional formulation of segmentation of images using active contours with edges exhibits an inherent shortcoming: when the boundaries between skin and lesions is smooth, edge based features tend to give poor segmentation results. An alternative formulation of active contours using structure tensor is proposed in which creasness features (peaks and valleys) are used for the determination of lesion boundaries, which enhance directional gradients while inhibiting local texture attributes in the images. The creasness features are used for formulation of external energy term in the active contour framework to segment dermoscopy images. Experiments show that the proposed segmentation method exhibits good performance comparing favorably to the traditional edge based active contour formulation.