Automated color calibration method for dermoscopy images

Accurate color information in dermoscopy images is very important for melanoma diagnosis since inappropriate white balance or brightness in the images adversely affects the diagnostic performance. In this paper, we present an automated color calibration method for dermoscopy images of skin lesions. On a set of 319 dermoscopy images, we develop color calibration filters based on the HSV color system. We determined that the color characteristics of the peripheral part of the tumors have significant influence on the color calibration filters and confirmed that the presented filters achieved satisfactory calibration performance as evaluated by cross-validation. We also confirmed that our method successfully modifies the color distribution of a given image to make it closer to the color distribution of the training image set.