Apparatus and method for identification of tissue regions in digital mammographic images

摘要

A method of identifying tissue regions in a digital image representing a body part provides a digital image representing a body part having tissue regions. The digital image is scaled by subsampling or interpolation, and texture extraction is applied to the scaled image to produce a plurality of texture images each having a different measure of the image texture. The texture images are clustered, and the clustered image is labeled based on both pixel intensity values and geometric adjacency of pixels. A threshold is applied to the labeled image, which is then filtered using a largest component filter system to determine the largest geometrically connected region in the threshold image. The filtered image is subjected to edge detection to produce an edge image containing only edge pixels at high code value, and the edge image is operated on to produce a convex hull image which outlines the skin line of the tissue region of the body part provided in the digital image.