TITLE:
Contour Extraction of Skin Tumors Using Visual Attention and GVF-Snake Model
AUTHORS:
Li Ma, Tianzhen Su
KEYWORDS:
Visual Attention; GVF-Snake; Contour Extraction; Skin Tumors
JOURNAL NAME:
Engineering,
Vol.5 No.10B,
December
18,
2013
ABSTRACT: Contour extraction of skin tumors accurately is an important
task for further feature generation of their borders and sur-faces to
early diagnose melanomas. An integrated approach, combining
visual attention model and GVF-snake, is pro-posed in the paper
to provide a general framework for locating tumor boundaries in case of noise and
boundaries with large concavity. For any skin image, the visual attention model
is implemented to locate the Region of Interests (ROIs) based on saliency maps.
Then an algorithm called GVF-snake is utilized to iteratively drive an initial contour,
deriving from the extracted ROIs, towards real boundary of skin tumors by minimizing
an energy function. It is shown from ex-periments that the
proposed approach exceeds in two aspects compared with other contour-deforming methods:
1) ini-tial contours generated from saliency maps are definitely located at
neighboring regions of real boundaries of skin tu-mors to speed up converges
of contour deformation and achieve higher accuracy; 2) the method is not sensitive
to nois-es on skins and initial contours extracted.