A multi-direction GVF snake for the segmentation of skin cancer images

A multi-direction gradient vector flow (GVF) snake-based scheme is proposed in this paper for the segmentation of skin cancer images. Unlike the traditional anisotropic diffusion (AD) filter, which has many disadvantages such as sensitivity to noise, a new AD filter has been developed to remove the noise. The proposed AD filter uses adaptive threshold selection and a new gradient computation method, which is robust to noise and can effectively remove the hairs. After the noise is removed from the skin cancer image, the image is segmented using a multi-direction GVF snake. The multi-direction GVF snake extends the single direction GVF snake and traces the boundary of the skin cancer even if there are other objects near the skin cancer region. Experiments performed on 11 cancer images show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.