Hair Removal Combining Saliency, Shape and Color

In a computer-aided system for skin cancer diagnosis, hair removal is one of the main challenges to face before applying a process of automatic skin lesion segmentation and classification. In this paper, we propose a straightforward method to detect and remove hair from dermoscopic images. Preliminarily, the regions to consider as candidate hair regions and the border/corner components located on the image frame are automatically detected. Then, the hair regions are determined using information regarding the saliency, shape and image colors. Finally, the detected hair regions are restored by a simple inpainting method. The method is evaluated on a publicly available dataset, comprising 340 images in total, extracted from two commonly used public databases, and on an available specific dataset including 13 images already used by other authors for evaluation and comparison purposes. We propose also a method for qualitative and quantitative evaluation of a hair removal method. The results of the evaluation are promising as the detection of the hair regions is accurate, and the performance results are satisfactory in comparison to other existing hair removal methods.