Erosion band signatures for spatial extraction of features

We introduce Erosion Band Signatures (EBS), which are a codification of the spatial coherence of features extracted from a region. This coherence is often lost in traditional global and local feature extraction methods, thereby diminishing a feature’s discriminative strength. The erosion band signature is generated through iterative erosions of the region of interest, forming what we call erosion bands . Features are then extracted from each band and accumulated in a specific order to form the EB signature, which preserves spatial information of the features. To demonstrate the versatility of EBS, we have implemented the method in two very different applications: polyp detection and region-based head tracking. In polyp detection, EBS provides an effective way to characterize spatial differences between the perimeter and core of a polyp candidate, and improves a state-of-the-art computer-aided detection method with an improved 27.6% reduction of false positives. We also apply EBS analysis to region-based tracking yielding a very clear improvement in both robustness and accuracy.