Melanoma detection using color and texture features in computer vision systems

All forms of skin cancer are becoming widespread. These forms of cancer, and melanoma in particular, are insidious and aggressive and if not treated promptly can be lethal to humans. Effective treatment of skin lesions depends strongly on the timeliness of the diagnosis: for this reason, artificial vision systems are required to play a crucial role in supporting the diagnosis of skin lesions. This work offers insights into the state of the art in the field of melanoma image classification. We include a numerical section where a preliminary analysis of some classification techniques is performed, using color and texture features on a data set constituted by plain photographies, to which no pre-processing technique has been applied. This is motivated by the necessity to open new horizons in creating self-diagnosis systems for accessible skin lesions, due also to a huge innovation of cameras, smartphones technology and wearable devices.