Colour segmentation for the analysis of pigmented skin lesions

A colour segmentation scheme based on two-dimensional histogram analysis and the fuzzy c-means clustering technique is presented. The method is applied to digitised epiluminescence microscopy images of pigmented skin lesions and is used for the extraction of all homogeneously coloured regions. Methods to reduce the influence of small structures, hairs, bubbles, light reflection, and other artefacts are proposed as pre- and post-processing steps.