The problem of labeling the connected components of a binary image is well-defined and several proposals have been presented in the past. Since an exact solution to the problem exists, algorithms mainly differ on their execution speed. In this paper, we propose and describe YACCLAB, Yet Another Connected Components Labeling Benchmark. Together with a rich and varied dataset, YACCLAB contains an open source platform to test new proposals and to compare them with publicly available competitors. Textual and graphical outputs are automatically generated for many kinds of tests, which analyze the methods from different perspectives. An extensive set of experiments among state-of-the-art techniques is reported and discussed.

In this paper we introduce a new Connected Components Labeling (CCL) algorithm which exploits a novel approach to model decision problems as Directed Acyclic Graphs with a root, which will be called Directed Rooted Acyclic Graphs (DRAGs). This structure supports the use of sets of equivalent actions, as required by CCL, and optimally leverages these equivalences to reduce the number of nodes (decision points). The advantage of this representation is that a DRAG, differently from decision trees usually exploited by the state-of-the-art algorithms, will contain only the minimum number of nodes required to reach the leaf corresponding to a set of condition values. This combines the benefits of using binary decision trees with a reduction of the machine code size. Experiments show a consistent improvement of the execution time when the model is applied to CCL.

This paper presents a novel strategy to perform skin lesion segmentation from dermoscopic images. We design an effective segmentation pipeline, and explore several pre-training methods to initialize the features extractor, highlighting how different procedures lead the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to focus on different features. An encoder-decoder segmentation CNN is employed to take advantage of each pre-trained features extractor. Experimental results reveal how multiple initialization strategies can be exploited, by means of an ensemble method, to obtain state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation accuracy.