The automatic detection of dermoscopic features is a task that provides the specialists with an image with indications about the different patterns present in it. This information can help them fully understand the image and improve their decisions. However, the automatic analysis of dermoscopic features can be a difficult task because of their small size. Some work was performed in this area, but the results can be improved. The objective of this work is to improve the precision of the automatic detection of dermoscopic features. To achieve this goal, an algorithm named yolo-dermoscopic-features is proposed. The algorithm consists of four points: (i) generate annotations in the JSON format for supervised learning of the model; (ii) propose a model based on the latest version of Yolo; (iii) pre-train the model for the segmentation of skin lesions; (iv) train five models for the five dermoscopic features. The experiments are performed on the ISIC 2018 task2 dataset. After training, the model is evaluated and compared to the performance of two methods. The proposed method allows us to reach average performances of 0.9758, 0.954, 0.9724, 0.938, and 0.9692, respectively, for the Dice similarity coefficient, Jaccard similarity coefficient, precision, recall, and average precision. Furthermore, comparing to other methods, the proposed method reaches a better Jaccard similarity coefficient of 0.954 and, thus, presents the best similarity with the annotations made by specialists. This method can also be used to automatically annotate images and, therefore, can be a solution to the lack of features annotation in the dataset.

Deep learning models yield remarkable results in skin lesions analysis. However, these models require considerable amounts of data, while accessibility to the images with annotated skin lesions is often limited, and the classes are often imbalanced. Data augmentation is one way to alleviate the lack of labeled data and class imbalance. This paper proposes a new data augmentation method based on image fusion technique to construct large dataset on all existing tones. The fusion method consists of a pulse-coupled neural network fusion strategy in a non-subsampled shearlet transform domain and consists of three steps: decomposition, fusion, and reconstruction. The dermoscopic dataset is obtained by combining ISIC2019 and ISIC2020 Challenge datasets. A comparative study with current algorithms was performed to access the effectiveness of the proposed one. The first experiment results indicate that the proposed algorithm best preserves the lesion dermoscopic structure and skin tones features. The second experiment, which consisted of training a convolutional neural network model with the augmented dataset, indicates a more significant increase in accuracy by 15.69%, and 15.38% respectively for tanned, and brown skin categories. The model precision, recall, and F1-score have also been increased. The obtained results indicate that the proposed augmentation method is suitable for dermoscopic images and can be used as a solution to the lack of dark skin images in the dataset.