Blood detection in wireless capsule endoscope images based on salient superpixels

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) enables screening of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract with a miniature, optical endoscope packed within a small swallowable capsule, wirelessly transmitting color images. In this paper we propose a novel method for automatic blood detection in contemporary WCE images. Blood is an alarming indication for the presence of pathologies requiring further treatment. The proposed method is based on a new definition of superpixel saliency. The saliency of superpixels is assessed upon their color, enabling the identification of image regions that are likely to contain blood. The blood patterns are recognized by their color features using a supervised learning machine. Experiments performed on a public dataset using automatically selected first-order statistical features from various color components indicate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.