Accurate border delineation of pigmented skin lesion (PSL) images is a vital first step in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of melanoma. This thesis presents a novel approach of automatic PSL border detection on color and multispectral skin images. We first introduce the concept of energy minimization by graph cuts in terms of maximum a posteriori estimation of a Markov random field (MAP-MRF framework). After a brief state of the art in interactive graph-cut based segmentation methods, we study the influence of parameters of the segmentation algorithm on color images. Under this framework, we propose an energy function based on efficient classifiers (support vector machines and random forests) and a feature vector calculated on a local neighborhood. For the segmentation of melanoma, we estimate the concentration maps of skin chromophores, discriminating indices of melanomas from color and multispectral images, and integrate these features in a vector. Finally, we detail an global framework of automatic segmentation of melanoma, which comprises two main stages: automatic selection of "seeds" useful for graph cuts and the selection of discriminating features. This tool is compared favorably to classic graph-cut based segmentation methods in terms of accuracy and robustness.
