Image processing system and methods for aligning skin features for early skin cancer detection systems

摘要

Embodiments of an image processing system and methods for aligning features suitable for use in early skin-cancer detection systems are described herein. Corresponding skin features between a reference image and a later-captured image are precisely aligned. Curvatures are used to align body outlines of corresponding images using body-background masks. An initial-displacement flowfield map, generated from the aligned body outlines, may be applied to a filtered version of the later-captured image to generate a pre-warped image. The pre-warped image and a filtered version of the reference image are divided into a plurality of overlapping chips and a correlation is performed between corresponding chips. A transformation map may be generated based on the chip correlations. This chipping process may be iterated for successively smaller chip sizes to generate a final transform map which may be applied to the later-captured image to generate a registered image having its skin features aligned with the reference image.