Automatic Melanoma Skin Cancer Detection and Segmentation using Snakecut Algorithm

Abstract

Early detection of melanoma skin cancer is crucial for effective treatment, and computer-aided diagnostic technologies offer promising advancements for dermatologists to make faster, more precise diagnoses of skin lesions. Segmenting skin lesions is a crucial first step towards automated Computer-Aided Diagnosis for skin cancer. This paper aims to use SnakeCut, a foreground extraction approach, to automatically segment skin lesions in HSV color space with little human interaction. Active contour (otherwise called Snake) and Improved GrabCut are the two popular methods. By decreasing the energy function of the related contour, the active contour acts as a deformable segmentation contour. Improved GrabCut uses updated iterated graph cuts to store color attributes used as segmentation signals in order to achieve foreground segmentation from close-by pixel similarities in its foreground segmentation algorithm. The proposed integrated solution, which is predicated on a probabilistic framework, is termed “SnakeCut.” We removed the outer black border using preprocessing. Later feature extraction is done using HOG and HSV and classifies the benign or melanoma state using Naïve Bayes, Decision tree, and K-nearest neighbor classifiers. The efficiency of the segmentation strategy was measured using the Jaccard Index. We compared the classification results of our method with existing state-of-the-art approaches. The study demonstrates the efficacy of Automatic SnakeCut in accurately segmenting skin lesions, thereby enhancing the performance of subsequent classification tasks. The average F-score was 0.75 on the 2017 ISIC challenge training dataset of 100 images. Compared to other methods, this study’s findings reveal that the suggested method is highly accurate.