  Background: Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the
diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty
and subjectivity of human interpretation, automated analysis of dermoscopy
images has become an important research area. Border detection is often the
first step in this analysis. Methods: In this article, we present an
approximate lesion localization method that serves as a preprocessing step for
detecting borders in dermoscopy images. In this method, first the black frame
around the image is removed using an iterative algorithm. The approximate
location of the lesion is then determined using an ensemble of thresholding
algorithms. Results: The method is tested on a set of 428 dermoscopy images.
The localization error is quantified by a metric that uses dermatologist
determined borders as the ground truth. Conclusion: The results demonstrate
that the method presented here achieves both fast and accurate localization of
lesions in dermoscopy images.
