Automatic skin lesion segmentation based on supervised learning

The accuracy of automatic skin lesion detection is important in the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of skin cancers. In this paper, a novel method of automatic skin lesion segmentation to get the accurate border is proposed. The initial lesion is extracted by the Otsu's threshold firstly. Secondly, the outer peripheral region around the initial lesion is obtained with the affinity propagation clustering method (AP). The outer periphery is divided into small homogeneous sub-regions using simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC). Finally, the homogeneous sub-regions are classified into the background skin and lesion by supervised learning and the accuracy border is obtained. A series of experiments done on the proposed method and the other four state-of-the-art automatic methods show that the proposed method delivers better accuracy and robust segmentation results.