Howard Zhou | Research | Medical | DermFind

SPIE Medical Imaging 2008

Feature-preserving Artifact Removal from Dermoscopy Images

Georgia Tech

Intel Research Pittsburgh

Laura Ferris
Jonhan Ho
Laura Drogowski

University of Pittsburgh

Paper

SPIE Medical Imaging Symposium
San Diego, 2008

abstract version (4 pages)
(720 KB)(pdf)

paper draft (9 pages)
(1.4 MB)(pdf)

Abstract :

Dermoscopy, also called surface microscopy, is a non-invasive imaging procedure developed for early screening of skin cancers. With recent advances in skin imaging technologies and development of new image processing techniques, there has been a significant increase of interest in computed aided-diagnosis of pigmented skin lesions from dermoscopy images. Such diagnosis requires the identification of over one hundred cutaneous morphological features. However, computer procedures designed for extracting and classifying these intricate features can be distracted by the presence of artifacts like hair, ruler markings, and air bubbles. Therefore, reliable artifact removal is an important pre-processing step for improving the performance of computer-aided dermoscopy diagnosis. In this paper, we present a new scheme that automatically detects and removes hairs and ruler markings from dermoscopy images. Moreover, our method also addresses the issue of preserving morphological features during the artifact removal process. The key component of our methods include explicit curvilinear structure detection and modeling, as well as feature guided exemplar-based inpainting. We experiment on a data set of 460 dermoscopy images and demonstrate that our method produces superior results compared to existing artifact removal procedures.

Slides

Coming soon

Bibtex

@InProceedings{Zhou:2008:FeaturePreserving,
  author    = {Howard Zhou and Mei Chen and Richard Gass 
               and James M. Rehg and Laura Ferris 
               and Jonhan Ho and Laura Drogowski},
  title     = {Feature Preserving Artifact Removal from 
               Dermoscopy Images},
  booktitle = {Proc. of SPIE Medical Imaging: Image Processing},
  month     = {February},
  year      = {2008},
  volume    = {6914},
  number    = {46},
  pages     = {},
  address   = {San Diego, USA},
  note      = {Accepted for publication}
}

Gallery

Additional results

Figure. Close-up views of images from the result comparison. (a) Original dermoscopy images. (b) Result from using our feature-preserving artifact removal method. (c) Result from using Schemid et al.’s method.