Segmentation of Erythema from Skin Photographs for Assisted Diagnosis in Allergology

Elodie Roullot (1) , Jean-Eric Autegarden , Patrick Devriendt , Francisque Leynadier

1 ESME - ESME - École spéciale de mécanique et d'électricité

More than 2 people out of 10 suffer from allergies, which can take various forms, from eczema to anaphylactic reactions with possible lethal consequences. Diagnosis is achieved through so-called "prick-tests" or IDR (intra-dermo-reaction): the injection of a small quantity of substances suspected to cause the allergic manifestation induces an erythema, the size of which is a useful indicator for the diagnosis. The manual surface measurement is time-consuming and inaccurate. This article presents a method for the semi-automatic measurement of the erythema from a photograph of the skin, taken in such conditions that lighting problems are minimized. The method is based on region growing and takes advantage of the most significant color spaces; the Lab space appears to be the best suited. It was tested on nearly 100 images, taken by various operators, on patients with various skin pigmentations; it gave promising results and proved to be robust.

Mots clés: skin; erythema; allergology; image processing; segmentation

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Elodie Roullot, Jean-Eric Autegarden, Patrick Devriendt, Francisque Leynadier. Segmentation of Erythema from Skin Photographs for Assisted Diagnosis in Allergology. International Conference on Advances in Pattern Recognition, Aug 2005, Bath, United Kingdom. pp.754-763. ⟨hal-00756086⟩