Skin Lesion Segmentation Using Local Binary Convolution-Deconvolution Architecture

Deep learning techniques such as Deep Convolutional Networks have achieved great success in skin lesion segmentation towards melanoma detection. The performance is however restrained by distinctive and challenging features of skin lesions such as irregular and fuzzy border, noise and artefacts presence and low contrast between lesions. The methods are also restricted with scarcity of annotated lesion images training dataset and limited computing resources. Recent research in convolutional neural network (CNN) has provided a variety of new architectures for deep learning. One interesting new architecture is the local binary convolutional neural network (LBCNN), which can reduce the workload of CNNs and improve the classification accuracy. The proposed framework employs the local binary convolution on U-net architecture instead of the standard convolution in order to reduced-size deep convolutional encoder-decoder network that adopts loss function for robust segmentation. The proposed framework replaced the encoder part in U-net by LBCNN layers. The approach automatically learns and segments complex features of skin lesion images. The encoder stage learns the contextual information by extracting discriminative features while the decoder stage captures the lesion boundaries of the skin images. This addresses the issues with encoder-decoder network producing coarse segmented output with challenging skin lesions appearances such as low contrast between healthy and unhealthy tissues and fine grained variability. It also addresses issues with multi-size, multi-scale and multi-resolution skin lesion images. The deep convolutional network also adopts a reduced-size network with just five levels of encoding-decoding network. This reduces greatly the consumption of computational processing resources. The system was evaluated on publicly available dataset of ISIC and PH2. The proposed system outperforms most of the existing state-of-art.