A novel pectoral muscle segmentation from scanned mammograms using EMO algorithm

Mammogram images are majorly used for detecting the breast cancer. The level of positivity of breast cancer is detected after excluding the pectoral muscle from mammogram images. Hence, it is very significant to identify and segment the pectoral muscle from the mammographic images. In this work, a new multilevel thresholding, on the basis of electro-magnetism optimization (EMO) technique, is proposed. The EMO works on the principle of attractive and repulsive forces among the charges to develop the members of a population. Here, both Kapur's and Otsu based cost functions are employed with EMO separately. These standard functions are executed over the EMO operator till the best solution is achieved. Thus, optimal threshold levels can be identified for the considered mammographic image. The proposed methodology is applied on all the three twenty-two mammogram images available in mammographic image analysis society dataset, and successful segmentation of the pectoral muscle is achieved for majority of the mammogram images. Hence, the proposed algorithm is found to be robust for variations in the pectoral muscle.