An introductory analysis of digital infrared thermal imaging guided oral cancer detection using multiresolution rotation invariant texture features

This manuscript presents an analytical treatment on the feasibility of multi-scale Gabor filter bank response for non-invasive oral cancer pre-screening and detection in the long infrared spectrum. Incapability of present healthcare technology to detect oral cancer in budding stage manifests in high mortality rate. The paper contributes a step towards automation in non-invasive computer-aided oral cancer detection using an amalgamation of image processing and machine intelligence paradigms. Previous works have shown the discriminative difference of facial temperature distribution between a normal subject and a patient. The proposed work, for the first time, exploits this difference further by representing the facial Region of Interest(ROI) using multiscale rotation invariant Gabor filter bank responses followed by classification using Radial Basis Function(RBF) kernelized Support Vector Machine(SVM). The proposed study reveals an initial increase in classification accuracy with incrementing image scales followed by degradation of performance; an indication that addition of more and more finer scales tend to embed noisy information instead of discriminative texture patterns. Moreover, the performance is consistently better for filter responses from profile faces compared to frontal faces.This is primarily attributed to the ineptness of Gabor kernels to analyze low spatial frequency components over a small facial surface area. On our dataset comprising of 81 malignant, 59 pre-cancerous, and 63 normal subjects, we achieve state-of-the-art accuracy of 85.16% for normal v/s precancerous and 84.72% for normal v/s malignant classification. This sets a benchmark for further investigation of multiscale feature extraction paradigms in IR spectrum for oral cancer detection.