A novel method for color correction in epiluminescence microscopy

Abstract This paper proposes a new color correction pipeline to improve the dermoscopy image quality. Images acquired with different cameras or different dermoscopes often present problems of faithful color reproduction. The colors of these images are often far different the ones observed with the naked eye, and usually vary from one camera to another. Nowadays digital cameras perform “black-box” color corrections taking into account the color temperature of the imaged scene, which may result in some cases in unrealistic color rendering. For this reason, it is necessary to calibrate the imaging system (the camera and a specific dermoscope). The calibration process requires finding a relationship between a device-dependent color space and a standard color space depending only on the human eye. This relation is obtained acquiring known color patches of a color checker and relating them with the pixel values obtained by the camera. In our approach we model the color calibration problem using a new formulation that takes into account the spectral distribution of the dermoscope lighting system and conveys a solution for both RAW and JPEG images. When comparing images captured with different cameras, this new method improves the results between 0.1 and 0.9 Δ E with respect to previous approaches.