ROI Detection in Mammogram Images using Wavelet-Based Haralick and HOG Features

Digital mammography is a widespread medical imaging technique that is used for early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer. Detecting the region of interest (ROI) helps to locate the abnormal areas, which may be analyzed further by a radiologist or a CAD system. In this paper, a new classification method is proposed for ROI detection in mammography images. Features are extracted using Wavelet transform, Haralick and HOG descriptors. To reduce the number of dimensions and eliminate irrelevant features, a wrapper-based feature selection method is implemented. Several feature extraction methods and machine learning classifiers are compared by performing a leave-one-image-out cross-validation experiment on a difficult dataset. The proposed feature extraction method provides the best accuracy of 87.5% and the second-best area under curve (AUC) score of 84% when employed in a random forest classifier.