Automatic segmentation and degree identification in burn color images

When burn injury occurs, the most important step is to provide treatment to the injury immediately by identifying degree of the burn which can only be diagnosed by specialists. However, specialists for burn trauma are still inadequate for some local hospitals. Hence, the invention of an automatic system that is able to help evaluating the burn would be extremely beneficial to those hospitals. The aim of this work is to develop an automatic system with the ability of providing the first assessment to burn injury from burn color images. The method used in this work can be divided into 2 parts, i.e., burn image segmentation and degree of burn identification. Burn image segmentation employs the Cr-transformation, Luv-transformation and fuzzy c-means clustering technique to separate the burn wound area from healthy skin and then mathematical morphology is applied to reduce segmentation errors. The segmentation algorithm performance is evaluated by the positive predictive value (PPV) and the sensitivity (S). Burn degree identification uses h-transformation and texture analysis to extract feature vectors and the support vector machine (SVM) is applied to identify the degree of burn. The classification results are compared with that of Bayes and K-nearest neighbor classifiers. The experimental results show that our proposed segmentation algorithm yields good results for the burn color images. The PPV and S are about 0.92 and 0.84, respectively. Degree of burn identification experiments show that SVM yields the best results of 89.29 % correct classification on the validation sets of the 4-fold cross validation. SVM also yields 75.33 % correct classification on the blind test experiment.