This thesis deals with automated image classification, applied to images acquired with alveoscopy, a new imaging technique of the distal lung. The aim is to propose and develop a computer aided-diagnosis system, so as to help the clinician analyze these images never seen before. Our contributions lie in the development of effective, robust and generic methods to classify images of healthy and pathological patients. Our first classification system is based on a rich and local characterization of the images, an ensemble of random trees approach for classification and a rejection mechanism, providing the medical expert with tools to enhance the reliability of the system. Due to the complexity of alveoscopy images and to the lack of expertize on the pathological cases (unlike healthy cases), we adopt the one-class learning paradigm which allows to learn a classifier from healthy data only. We propose a one-class approach taking advantage of combining and randomization mechanisms of ensemble methods to respond to common issues such as the curse of dimensionality. Our method is shown to be effective, robust to the dimension, competitive and even better than state-of-the-art methods on various public datasets. It has proved to be particularly relevant to our medical problem.
