title: Watershed segmentation of detected masses in digital mammograms.
abstract: A method for segmentation of detected masses in digital mammograms is introduced. The method is based on gray scale mathematical morphology. In a preprocessing step, image enhancement based on a local histogram technique is applied, followed by a morphological smoothing operation. The watershed transform is then applied to the gradient of the smoothed image resulting in segmented regions. A good segmentation is important in order to be able to extract useful feature measures from the segmented regions. These feature measures can be input to a classifier which classifies each region as either a mass or a false detection. Initial experiments have been performed using mammograms from the MIAS database. Results of the experimental study indicate that our scheme can provide useful contour extraction for mass structures.
authors.affiliation: University of Stavanger, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stavanger, Norway. thor.gulsrud@uis.no.
authors.forename: Thor
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ole Gulsrud
authors.forename: Kjersti
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Engan
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hanstveit