Pigmented skin lesion segmentation on macroscopic images

Several pigmented skin lesion segmentation methods have been proposed for dermoscopy images, however skin lesion segmentation on macroscopic images have not received much attention. Despite the fact that dermoscopy is a very specialized technique, in some practical situations, patients do not have a fast access to an specialist. In this situations, pre-screening systems can be used to evaluate a suspect skin lesion by a non-specialist, and lesion segmentation is very important for the success of such systems. This paper proposes a new method for segmenting pigmented skin lesions on macroscopic images acquired with standard cameras. Our method is simpler than comparable methods proposed for dermoscopy, and our experiments based on publicly available datasets of pigmented skin lesion images show promising results. Our approach can achieve an average segmentation error of 24.85%, which is better than the accuracy of comparable methods available in the literature (even for illumination corrected images).