See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/326621132

Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency, LBP and SFTA methods for
breast abnormality classification

Article  in  International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering · January 2018

DOI: 10.1504/IJSISE.2018.093266

CITATIONS READS

0 141

3 authors, including:

Spandana Paramkusham
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani
9 PUBLICATIONS   29 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Spandana Paramkusham on 26 November 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

136 Int. J. Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2018

Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency,

LBP and SFTA methods for breast abnormality
classification

Spandana Paramkusham*, Kunda M.M. Rao

and B.V.V.S.N. Prabhakar Rao
Department of Electrical Engineering,
BITS Pilani – Hyderabad Campus,
R.R. Dist. Hyderabad – 500078, India
Email: p2011013@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in
Email: kundammrao@gmail.com
Email: budhiraju@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in
*Corresponding author

Abstract: Breast cancer is the second most prominent cancer diagnosed among women. Digital
mammography is one of the effective imaging modalities used to detect breast cancer in early
stages. Computer-aided detection systems help radiologists to detect and diagnose abnormalities
earlier and faster in a mammogram. In this paper, a comprehensive study is carried out on
different feature extraction methods for classification of abnormal areas in a mammogram.
The prominent techniques used for feature extraction in this study are local binary pattern (LBP),
rotation invariant local frequency (RILF) and segmented fractal texture analysis (SFTA).
Features extracted from these techniques are then fed to a support vector machine (SVM)
classifier for further classification via 10-fold cross-validation method. The evaluation is
performed using image retrieval in medical applications (IRMA) database for feature extraction.
Our statistical analysis shows that the RILF technique outperforms the LBP and SFTA
techniques.

Keywords: breast cancer; mammograms; masses; microcalcification; feature extraction; SVM;

support vector machine.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Paramkusham, S., Rao, K.M.M. and
Prabhakar Rao, B.V.V.S.N. (2018) ‘Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency, LBP and
SFTA methods for breast abnormality classification’, Int. J. Signal and Imaging Systems
Engineering, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp.136–150.

Biographical notes: Spandana Paramkusham is presently a research scholar at BITS Pilani,

Hyderabad working on early detection of breast cancer using image processing techniques.
Her research interests include medical image processing, pattern recognition and machine
learning.

Kunda M.M. Rao joined Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1973. He was responsible
for the design and development of Black and White and Colour Drum Scanner Imager,
the first time in India, for digitising and reproducing various types of photographic prints.
He received his PhD degree in Image Processing from SK University, Ananthapur.
Currently, he is an Adjunct Professor, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad campus. His areas of interests
include satellite data processing, image processing, medical imaging, data mining and photo
writing.

B.V.V.S.N. Prabhakar Rao is working as an Associate Professor in the Department of

Electrical Engineering, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad campus. He has 18 years of teaching
and research experience. He received his PhD degree from Indian Institute of Technology,
Delhi. His current research interest is in the area of nonlinear optics and biomedical signal
processing.

Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency, LBP and SFTA methods for breast abnormality classification 137
1 Introduction
Breast cancer is the second most leading cause of death in
India and most common cancer in the world. Breast cancer
has been on a steady rise in this new period. About 155,000
new cases of breast cancer have been diagnosed in the year
2015 in India and 76,000 women were expected to die due
to breast cancer. Early detection of breast cancer helps in
increasing survival rates of breast cancers. Digital
mammography is a key imaging modality for breast
screening using x-rays. It detects cancer before physical
changes develop. However, dense mammogram shows a
small difference between normal and abnormal tissues due
to low X-ray attenuation (Suneeta et al., 2017). Computer-
aided diagnosis plays a vital role to assist radiologists in the
detection and analysis of abnormalities in a mammogram.
CAD system requires good image processing methods to
increase sensitivity and specificity (Hadjiiski et al., 2006).
Four abnormal signs of breast cancer are:
• microcalcifications
• masses
• bilateral asymmetry
• architectural distortion (Salvado and Roque, 2005).
Microcalifications are tiny calcium deposits and appear as a
small bright region with different shapes on the breast
(Tiedeu et al., 2012). Masses are the most common
asymmetric signs of cancer and appear brighter than the
surrounding tissue (Timp et al., 2007). Most benign masses
possess well-defined sharp borders, while malignant masses
often have ill-defined, microlobulated, or spiculated borders
(Rangayyan et al., 2010). Bilateral asymmetry is an
asymmetry of the breast parenchyma between left and right
breast and this asymmetry indicates breast cancer in its early
stage. An architectural distortion on a mammogram is
basically a disruption of the normal ‘random’ pattern of
curvilinear and fine linear radiopaque structures. There is no
visible mass, but the distortion often appears as a ‘stellate’
shape or with radiating spiculation (Beheshti et al., 2016).
Among all other image processing techniques that are used
for CAD, feature extraction is an important task. This
process should properly delineate normal and abnormal
areas in mammograms and the size of the extracted features
should be less so that the CAD system is computationally
efficient.
In this paper we have extracted features from ROIs,
taken from mammogram images, using rotation invariant
local frequency (RILF), local binary pattern (LBP) and
segmented fractal texture analysis (SFTA) techniques.
However, these techniques have been predominantly used in
real-world texture analysis problems. LBP and its variants
are proposed by Ojala et al. (2001). It has been used in
different fields, which include texture classification,
neonatal face expression recognition, stem cell
classification, detection of cervical cancer etc. (Liao et al.,
2007; Loris Nanni et al., 2013; Yimo Guo et al., 2012).
SFTA is proposed by Costa et al. (2012). LBP and SFTA
have been applied on ROIs to detect breast cancer (Lladó et
al., 2009; Beura et al., 2015). However, LBP compromises
some textural information due to thresholding and SFTA
loses some textural information due to thresholding. Among
the LBP and SFTA techniques, RILF is more robust to noise
and has a relatively small number of features (Rouzbeh et
al., 2013). Hence, we made the first attempt to study the use
of RILF technique and extended version of SFTA for
detecting normal and abnormal ROIs in mammograms.
Then, we compared its performance with LBP and SFTA.
2 Related works
Over the last few decades, researchers have proposed many
feature extraction techniques for abnormality detection in
mammograms. These techniques are used to classify
ROIs of mammograms into normal/abnormal and benign/
malignant. Haralick descriptors, correlogram function and
shape descriptors were proposed by de Nazare Silva et al.
(2015) to classify the mammogram ROIs into normal/
abnormal. Sharma and Khanna (2015) used Zernike
moments of different orders as features for the classification
of malignant and normal regions in a mammogram. Features
are extracted from approximation bands of curvelet
transform by Gedik and Atasoy (2013) to distinguish
mammograms into normal and abnormal regions. The ROIs
of mammograms are subdivided into blocks and LBP is
applied on each block by Lladó et al. (2009) to form a
feature vector. This feature vector is submitted to the
classifier to characterise mammogram regions. Mass in
mammograms was detected using LBP variance and shape
descriptors by Masmoudi et al. (2015). The 2D discrete
wavelet transforms has been applied by Edward et al. (2013)
to create a set of maps at different size scales. Then
statistical features were computed from each map, and a
subset of these features was submitted to Bayesian
classifiers to detect mammogram abnormal areas. The
rotation and scale invariant features are extracted by Ergin
and Kilinc (2014) using a histogram of oriented gradients
(HOG), dense scale invariant feature transform (DSIFT),
and local configuration pattern (LCP) methods to classify
breast tissues in mammogram into normal and abnormal.
Ericeira et al. (2013) proposed cross-variogram function to
detect structural variations (asymmetric regions) in left and
right breasts. Then, features are extracted using variogram
function to classify asymmetric regions into mass/non-mass.
Wajid and Hussain (2015) extracted Local energy-based
shape histogram (LESH) features and fed to support vector
machine to classify ROIs into benign and malignant
abnormalities. Wavelet and scaling coefficients are
extracted using spherical wavelet transform by Gorgel et al.
(2013) from breast abnormal regions to separate them into
mass/non-mass and benign/malignant. The taxonomic
diversity index (∆) and the taxonomic distinctness (∆n)
were calculated by de Oliveira et al. (2015) from
phylogenetic trees obtained from breast ROIs. Then, these
parameters are fed to classifiers to describe the ROIs into
mass/non-mass. Beheshti et al. (2016) proposed new fractal-
138 S. Paramkusham et al.

based asymmetric features to classify breast into In LBP(P,R), gc represents centre pixel and g0, g1, …, gP–1
mass/normal, microcalcification/normal and architectural represent neighbouring pixels, P corresponds to quantisation
distortion/normal. Features are computed from grey level of angular space (number of neighbours) and R (Radius of
cooccurrence matrix and grey level run length matrix by the neighbourhood) corresponds to the spatial resolution of
Mohanty et al. (2013) from ROIs of mammograms to the operator. The exact coordinates of neighbour pixels are
distinguish benign masses from malignant. Reyad et al.
(2014) compared statistical, blockwise LBP, wavelet and
given by ( − R sin ( ) , Rcos ( )) ,
2π p
P
2π p
P
if the centre pixel gc
curvelet features for the detection of normal/abnormal cases have coordinates (0, 0). The LBP descriptors are calculated
in a mammogram. These are some feature extraction from the histogram of the labelled image. The histogram
techniques that are used to describe mammograms. After H(k) for k = 1,2,3, …, K is given as.
extracting the features, selecting a better classifier helps in M N
increasing the efficiency of CAD system. As SVM classifier H ( k ) = ∑∑I ( LBP( P , R ) (i, j )) (2)
performs well for two class study, we have applied SVM i =1 j =1

classifier and evaluated the performance using 10-fold

where, K is the maximum label value in the LBP(P, R) image.
cross-validation.
Figure 1(a) shows the circularity symmetric neighbour sets
The present work is organised as follows: In Section 3,
for P = 8 and R = 1. Figure 1(b) shows the basic example of
we briefly explain the methodology of different feature
LBP operator. There are many variants of LBP based on
extraction techniques. In Section 4, we describe how these
encodings, the shape of neighbourhood and transitions in
techniques are applied on ROIs. The performance of LBP,
binary code generated for each pixel. LBP variants which
RILF and SFTA techniques is evaluated and comparison
are based on transitions and rotation invariance include
of these techniques was discussed in Section 5. The
uniform LBP, rotation invariant LBP, rotation invariant
conclusions were written in Section 6.
uniform LBP (Ojala et al., 2001). The LBP variants which
are based on the shape of the neighbourhood include
elliptical binary pattern (EBP) and hyperbolic binary pattern
3 Feature extraction techniques (HBP), these variants are considered to detect anisotropic
In this following section, we briefly explain the overview of features (Nanni et al., 2013). The LBP variants which are
all feature extraction techniques that are used in this work. based on encoding include local ternary pattern (LTP) and
These techniques are tested on the mammogram ROIs local quinary pattern (LQP). These variants have extra
for validation. The ROIs have been extracted from discriminative power and less sensitive to noise in uniform
mammogram using segmentation algorithm. Our focus is regions when compared to LBP. LTP was used for image
mainly on the classification of ROIs into normal/abnormal. retrieval by Vipparthi and Nagar (2015) and LQP was used
The abnormal ROIs can be either microcalcification or for stem cell classification by Paci et al. (2013). In order to
mass. study the application of LBP and its variants on
mammograms, we have extracted features from ROIs using
3.1 LBP and its variants uniform LBP, rotation invariant uniform LBP, rotation
uniform LBP, uniform LTP, rotation invariant uniform LTP,
3.1.1 LBP rotation uniform LTP, uniform LQP, rotation invariant
uniform LQP and rotation uniform LQP. LBP variants
The local binary pattern is an efficient rotation invariant
based on encodings are discussed below.
method for texture analysis. LBP has been presented by
many authors in many applications because of its Figure 1 (a) Circular symmetric neighbour for P = 8 and R = 1
computational efficiency, high discriminative power and and (b) Illustration of LBP operator
less vulnerability to illumination changes. This method is
first introduced by Ojala et al. (2001). They have considered
statistics of grey level differences. LBP operator assigns the
binary code i.e, 0 or 1 to each pixel based on the grey level
difference of that particular pixel and its neighbourhood.
The neighbouring pixel values which are not at the centre
are obtained by interpolation. For a centre pixel gc, LBP
code is defined as
p = P −1
LBP( P , R ) = ∑ s( g
p =0
p − g c )2 p (1)

where
s(x) = 1 for, x >= 0
= 0 for, x < 0
 Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency, LBP and SFTA methods for breast abnormality classification 139

3.1.2 Local ternary pattern where |fn(x, y)| is the magnitude of the nth(1 ≤ n ≤ 2)
frequency component of local function LCF(N, R) at (x, y),
The difference between the centre pixel and neighbourhood
and W and H are width and height of the image respectively.
pixel is encoded into three values with –τ 2 ≤ user
When the 2D spectrum is circularly shifted, range changes
threshold (τ). LTP coding strategy can be given as from [0: W–1, 0: H–1] to [–W/2: W/2–1, –H/2: H/2–1]. To
p = P −1 have rotation invariance property for these features, circular
LTP( P , R ) = ∑ s( g
p =0
p − g c )2 p (3) bandpass disc shape filters are applied to the spectrum of
frequency channels. These filters are defined as follows
where s(x) = 1 for x >= τ
1 if r1≤ x 2 + y 2 ≤ r 2
= 0 for –τ < x < τ Dr1, r 2 ( x, y ) =  (7)
0 otherwise
=–1 otherwise.
where r1 and r2 are the inner and outer radius of disc shape
filters. The rotation invariant local frequency magnitude
3.1.3 Local quinary pattern
descriptors (RILFMD) are computed as
The difference between the centre pixel and the W H

∑ ∑ CH ( k , l ) .D
−1 −1
neighbourhood pixel is encoded into three values with user 2 2 (k , l )
RILFMD ( r1, r 2, n ) = k =−W / 2 −H /2 n r1, r 2
thresholds (τ 1,τ 2). The definition for LQP is given as W H

∑ ∑ D (k , l )
−1 −1
2 2
k =−W / 2 −H /2 r1, r 2
p = P −1
LQP( P , R ) = ∑ s( g
p =0
p − g c )2 p
(4) (8)
where |CHn| is the magnitude of the Fourier spectrum
where s(x) = 2 for x >= τ
=1 for τ1 < x < τ2 3.3 SFTA
SFTA method involves two steps: In the first step, the input
= 0 for –τ1 ≥ x < τ1 grey level images are decomposed into a set of binary
= –1 for x < –τ1 images using two-threshold binary decomposition (TTBD).
Then in the second step, features like fractal dimensions,
= –2 for other wise. mean and size are computed for each binary image.
Step 1: Decomposition of image into binary images using
3.2 Rotation invariant local frequency
two threshold binary decomposition (TTBD)
RILF is a rotation invariant texture classification method
TTBD takes input as the grey level image I(x, y) and uses
based on local frequency components. In this method, local
multilevel Otsu’s algorithm to return binary images. This
circular function (LCF(N, R)(x, y)) is defined at each pixel to
algorithm calculates a set of threshold values (T) based on
obtain features. This local circular function considers N
minimisation of intra class variance and is applied to each
neighbouring samples on a circle with radius R at each pixel
image recursively until the desired nt (number of threshold
(x, y) as in LBP. In LBP, thresholding the neighbourhood
values) is reached. Initially, first set of binary images are
pixels compromises some textural information. To
obtained using the thresholds calculated from Otsu’s
overcome this problem 1D Fourier transform is applied on
algorithm. So, the total number of binary images is nt in the
(LCF(N, R)(x, y) = (t0, t1, t2, …, tN-1)). 1D Fourier transform of
first set. The second set of binary images are obtained by
LCF is given as
selecting pairs of thresholds from T.
2π i ( n −1) (5)
N −1 − I(x, y) is then decomposed into binary images by
fn = ∑tk e N
, ( n = 1, 2, … , N ) applying adjacent thresholds from T = {t, nl} where t ∈ T
k =0
and nl maximum grey level intensity in the image I(x, y).
The low-frequency components f1 and f2 are considered to The first set of binary images Ib1(x, y) is given by
obtain features. The reason for considering low-frequency
components is that they have 90% of the texture energy and 1 if I ( x, y ) >= t1 ∈ T
I b1 ( x, y ) =  (9)
they do not contain noise information which appears in high 0 otherwise
frequencies. Then, the magnitude based features are
The second set of binary images computed from pairs of
extracted from two low-frequency channels (f1 and f2).
thresholds (T = {t1, ... tnt, nl}) as follows
These features are obtained by computing circularly shifted
2D Fourier transform. The 2D spectrum of each frequency 1 if t1 < I ( x, y ) ≤ tu
channel CHn, (n = 1, 2) is given as I b 2 ( x, y ) =  (10)
0 otherwise
W −1H −1  xk yl 
−2 π i  + 
CH n ( k , l ) = ∑∑ f n ( x, y ) .e W H 
(6)
where tl and tu are upper and lower thresholds.
x =0 y =0
140 S. Paramkusham et al.

Step 2: Feature extraction from binary decomposed images: 4.3 Method 3

After applying TTBD algorithm, SFTA feature vector is 4.3.1 Segmental fractal texture analysis (SFTA)
extracted from the decomposed binary images. It includes
the mean of the grey level values, number of pixels and In this method, SFTA feature vectors have been extracted
fractal dimension from the boundary of the binary image. from ROIs with different thresholds of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.
These features are then fed to SVM classifier for
verification. Figure 2 shows the methodology followed to
detect abnormalities in ROIs using LBP and its variants,
4 Implementation of feature extraction
RILF and SFTA.
techniques
In this section, we have explained the implementation of Figure 2 Block diagram for the ROI classification using LBP,
different feature extraction techniques as mentioned in the SFTA and RILF feature extraction techniques
above section on ROIs to extract features. These extracted
features are then fed to a SVM classifier (linear kernel) via
10 fold cross-validation method to assess the significance of
the feature extraction techniques.

4.3.2 Extended version of SFTA

4.1 Method 1
• Block wise SFTA (BSFTA): ROI is further sub divided
4.1.1 LBP into N X N blocks as SFTA features are extracted for
In this method, different variants of LBP were applied to the each block and concatenated to form feature vector and
ROIs. The histograms of all these LBP variants are taken as fed to SVM classifier for further validation.
feature vectors for further classification.
• Pyramidal SFTA (PSFTA): In this method, ROI is
decomposed into image pyramid via the Gaussian filter
4.1.2 Extended version of LBP’s which is also known as scale space representation of the
image. For each level, SFTA features are calculated and
• Block wise LBP (BLBP): In this method, ROI is
concatenated to form a feature vector. Further, each
subdivided into N × N blocks. LBP histogram features
level feature vectors were given to classifier for
are calculated for each block and concatenated together
validation. The block diagram shown in Figure 3
to form complete feature vector of that particular ROI.
explains the process of detection of normal and
Further, this feature vector is given to SVM classifier
abnormal ROIs using BLBP and BSFTA. The block
for validation.
diagram in Figure 4 shows the procedure to classify
• Pyramidal LBP (PLBP): In this method, ROI is ROIs into normal and abnormal using PLBP and
decomposed into image pyramid via the Gaussian filter PSFTA.
(Wang et al., 2011) which is also known as scale space
representation of the image. Let I and Gk denote the Figure 3 Block diagram for the ROI classification using BLBP
and BSFTA
original image and the kth level of the image pyramid,
respectively. Then the image pyramid can be obtained
by
Gk ( x, y ) = I k = 0
I (11)
= ∑∑W ( m, n ) G ( 2 x + m, 2 y + n ) , k > 0
m n
k −1

where x and y are spatial coordinates of the image, W(m, n)

is as a Gaussian filter of size m X n.
LBP histogram features are then extracted from each
level of image pyramid and concatenated to form a feature
Figure 4 Block diagram for the classification of ROIs using
vector for further evaluation BLBP and BSFTA

4.2 Method 2
4.2.1 RILF
In this method RILF feature extraction technique,
magnitude descriptors are calculated from the low-
frequency channels using 2D Fourier transform. These
magnitude descriptors are considered as feature vectors and
passed to SVM classifier.
 Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency, LBP and SFTA methods for breast abnormality classification 141

5 Results and discussion Figure 5 ROIs of IRMA database: (a) mass;

(b) microcalcification and (c) normal
This section gives the results and discussion of RILF,
LBP and SFTA feature extraction techniques. Then, the
results of all types of feature extraction techniques
are compared.

5.1 Experimental setup

Evaluation of our study is carried out using 10 fold cross-
validation. In this validation method, feature data is divided
into 10 groups randomly. Among these groups, one group is
selected for test and other groups are for training. In this
procedure, each group will undergo testing and the mean of
all evaluation parameters from 10 groups is calculated to get
final accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity
measures the percentage of positive breast cancer cases that
are correctly classified. Specificity (true negative rate) is the
percentage of negative breast cancer cases that are correctly
classified. The expressions for sensitivity, specificity and
accuracy are given as.
Sensitivity ( Se) = TP / (TP + FN )

Specificity ( Sp ) = TN / (TN + FP )

Accuracy ( A) = (TP + TN ) / (TP + TN + FP + FN ) 5.3 Results of Method 1

where, TP, FP, TN, FN are true positive, false positive, true
negative and false negative respectively.
5.2 Database
The dataset used in this work is taken from image retrieval
in medical applications (IRMA) project database. The
database comprises of ROIs taken from digital mammogram
images of selected patients from the Radiological Diagnosis
Department of the University of Aachen. The datasets in the
IRMA project have three different cases of breast cancer:
Normal (no cancer), benign and malignant. The abnormal
(benign and malignant) cases have three different types of
abnormalities: Masses, microcalcifications and others
(Architectural distortion). IRMA database contains 2777
ROIs of which 932 are normal, 1157 are mass and 688 are
microcalcification. The images in the dataset are of
128 × 128 pixel size and at 256 grey levels.
These ROIs undergo feature extraction process using
RILF, LBP and SFTA techniques. Then, these features are
given to classifiers to detect abnormal ROIs. Classification
consists of two components. First one distinguishes
ROIs into mass/normal and second one delineates ROIs
into microcalcification/normal. To carry out these
classifications we have considered two datasets from IRMA
database. Dataset 1 contains 1157 mass and 932 normal
ROIs. These ROIs are used for both testing and training
in mass/normal classification. Dataset 2 encompasses
688 microcalcification and 932 normal ROIs for
microcalcification/normal classification. Figure 5(a)–(c)
show normal, mass and microcalcification ROIs taken from
IRMA database.
Method 1 was tested using ROIs with different LBP variants
such as uniform LBP, uniform rotation invariant LBP,
rotation invariant LBP, uniform LTP, uniform rotation
invariant LTP, rotation invariant LTP, uniform LQP,
uniform rotation invariant LQP and rotation invariant LQP.
We used three different neighbourhoods (8, 1), (12, 2) and
(16, 2) for testing.
5.3.1 LBP and its variants
• Results for mass/normal classification
In LBP, uniform LBP resulted in best values (accuracy of
88.17%, sensitivity of 93.50% and specificity of 83.87%)
with (8, 1) neighbourhood as shown in Figure 6. With LTP,
uniform LTP gave best values (accuracy of 91.47%,
sensitivity of 99.22% and specificity of 85.23%) with (8, 1)
neighbourhood as shown in Figure 7. In Figure 8, we can
observe that in LQP, rotational invariant LQP resulted in
best values (accuracy of 91.83%, sensitivity of 99.16% and
specificity of 85.92%) with (12,2).
• Results for microcalcification/normal classification
In LBP, uniform LBP resulted in best values (accuracy of
82.52%, sensitivity of 86.50% and specificity of 77.12%)
with (16, 2) neighbourhood as shown in Figure 9. In LTP,
uniform LTP obtained the best accuracy of 87.80%, with
97.02% sensitivity and of 75.31% specificity using (8, 1)
neighbourhood as shown in Figure 10. In LQP, uniform
rotation invariant LQP gave best values (accuracy of
86.40%, sensitivity of 94.44% and specificity of 75.55%)
with (12,2) neighbourhood as shown in Figure 11.
142 S. Paramkusham et al.

Figure 6 Results of LBP for mass/normal

Figure 7 Results of LTP for mass/normal

Figure 8 Results of LQP for mass/normal

Figure 9 Results of LBP for microcalcification/normal

 Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency, LBP and SFTA methods for breast abnormality classification 143

Figure 10 Results of LTP for microcalcification/normal

Figure 11 Results of LQP for microcalcification/normal

Figure 12 Results of BLBP for mass/normal

Among all the LBP variants, rotational invariant LQP gave
the highest accuracy of 91.83% for mass/normal
classification. Uniform LTP gave the highest accuracy of
87.80% for microcalcification/normal.
5.3.2 Extended versions of LBP
We have tested our dataset using the extended version of
LBP that are BLBP and PLBP.
• BLBP
Uniform rotation invariant blockwise LBP was tested by
dividing ROIs or patches into N X N blocks, where N = 2, 4,
8 and 16.
1 Results for mass/normal
The best accuracy of 87.66% is achieved by BLBP with
2 × 2 blocks per ROI and neighbourhood of (8, 1). Figure 12
depicts that, sensitivity and specificity with BLBP are
94.73% and 75.17% respectively.
2 Results for microcalcification/normal
In this classification, best accuracy of 79.24% is achieved
with 4 × 4 blocks per ROI and neighbourhood (8, 1). From
Figure 13 we can observe that BLBP features achieved
sensitivity of 82.25% and specificity of 75.17%,
respectively.
144 S. Paramkusham et al.
Figure 13 Results of BLBP for microcalcification/normal
Figure 14 Results of PLBP for mass/normal
Figure 15 Results of PLBP for microcalcification/normal
• PLBP
PLBP features are extracted from ROIs using three
decomposition levels 2,3and 4 with three neighbourhoods
(8, 1), (12, 2) and (16, 2). We decomposed ROI
into different levels and at each level uniform rotation,
invariant features are calculated. Then, these features at
each level are concatenated to form a complete feature
vector.
1 Results for mass/normal
PLBP resulted in the best accuracy of 83.35% with the
neighbourhood (8, 1) and three-level decomposition. From
Figure 14, we can observe that it has sensitivity of 86.52%
and specificity of 80.79%.
2 Results for microcalcification/normal
In PLBP, the best accuracy of 76.93% is obtained when
ROIs are decomposed into three levels and with
the neighbourhood of (8, 1). PLBP method achieved
sensitivity of 79.37% and specificity of 73.62% as shown in
Figure 15.
5.4 Results of Method 2
The rotation invariant local frequency magnitude descriptors
are calculated by considering 2D spectrum of two low-
frequency channels. This method is tested on ROIs by
considering five neighbourhoods [(N, R) = (8, 1), (16, 2),
(24, 3), (28, 4), (32, 5)]. We have extracted features from
 Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency, LBP and SFTA methods for breast abnormality classification 145

both channel 1 and channel 2. Figure 16 shows that RILF for microcalcification/normal classification. It depicts that
method gives best values (accuracy of 93.53%, sensitivity of the RILF gives best values (accuracy of 91.10%, sensitivity
99.51% and specificity of 88.71%) with neighbourhood of 98.04% and specificity of 81.17%) with the
(8, 1) for classifying mass/normal. Figure 17 shows results neighbourhood (8, 1).

Figure 16 Results of RILF for mass/normal

Figure 17 Results of RILF for microcalcification/normal

Figure 18 Results of SFTA for mass/normal

5.5 Results of Method 3 5.5.1 SFTA

Method 3 includes SFTA and extended versions of • Results for mass/normal: Figure 18 shows that SFTA
SFTA for extracting features. SFTA method is applied to method achieved the best accuracy of 89.70%,
all ROIs with a different number of thresholds (nt = 3, 4, 5, sensitivity of 95.31% and specificity of 41.09% with
6, 7, 8). nt = 3.
146 S. Paramkusham et al.

• Results for microcalcification/normal: Figure 19 shows
that SFTA method achieved the best accuracy
of 86.44%, sensitivity of 88.94% and specificity
of 81.27% for microcalcification/normal with nt = 3.
5.5.2 Extended version of SFTA
We have tested our ROIs with extended versions of SFTA
which includes BSFTA and PSFTA.
• BSFTA
In BSFTA method, ROI is divided into N × N blocks and
SFTA operator is applied to each block of ROI to extract
Figure 19 Results of SFTA for microcalcification/normal
features. These features extracted from each block are
concatenated to form enhanced feature vector.
1 Results for mass/normal
The results shown in Figure 20 makes it clear that BSFTA
gives the best accuracy of 88.47%, sensitivity of 89.16%,
and specificity of 42.54% with N = 2 and nt = 3 for
mass/normal.
2 Results for microcalcification/normal
From Figure 21, we can observe that BSFTA achieved
accuracy of 88.54%, sensitivity of 84.88% and specificity of
77.24% with N = 2 and nt = 3 for microcalcification/normal.

Figure 20 Results of BSFTA for mass/normal

Figure 21 Results of BSFTA for microcalcification/normal

 Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency, LBP and SFTA methods for breast abnormality classification 147
Figure 22 Results of PSFTA for mass/normal
Figure 23 Results of PSFTA for microcalcification/normal
• PSFTA
PSFTA features are extracted by decomposition of ROIs
using pyramidal filters into images. Then SFTA is applied at
each level of image pyramid to extract the features and these
features at each level are concatenated to form enhanced
feature vector.
1 Results for mass/normal
Figure 22 shows that PSFTA gives best accuracy of
91.98%, sensitivity of 97.29%, and specificity of 87.69% by
decomposing the images into two levels and selecting nt = 3
for SFTA feature extraction.
2 Results for microcalcification/normal
From Figure 23, we can observe that PSFTA achieved
accuracy of 89.81%, sensitivity of 91.60% and specificity of
83.90% at decomposition level 3 and number of threshold
nt = 4 for microcalcification/normal.
From the statistics, we observed that specificity in case
of mass/normal is very less because SFTA method gave
inconclusive results for many normal ROIs for all the
thresholds (nt = 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). The reason for such results
is because segmentation is performed globally based on
grey level intensity values and it does not consider
illumination and local changes in the image.
5.6 Comparison of all methods
5.6.1 Quantitative comparison of all methods
We have compared RILF method with best methods of LBP
and SFTA. Table 1 shows mean accuracy, sensitivity and
specificity calculated with RILF method and the best
methods of LBP and SFTA for mass/normal and
microcalcification/normal classification respectively. In
LBP methods, LQP attained the best accuracy of 91.83% for
mass/normal, and LTP attained the best accuracy of 87.80%
for microcalcification/normal, where as in SFTA methods,
pyramidal SFTA achieved best accuracy of 91.98% and
89.81% for mass/normal and microcalcification/normal
respectively. These values show that our method RILF
resulted in the best accuracy of 93.53% and 91.11% using
(8, 1) neighbourhood with ch1 and ch2 for mass/normal and
microcalcification/normal classification respectively. For
evaluation of these feature vectors, we have used linear
SVM classifier via 10-fold cross-validation. Table 1 shows
accuracy sensitivity and specificity per fold attained by
RILF and best methods of LBP and SFTA.
5.6.2 Statistical comparison between all methods
In this section, we have selected the best case in each
method and statistically compared using T-test. We applied
148 S. Paramkusham et al.

10-fold cross-validation method and calculated mean
accuracy, mean sensitivity and mean specificity. Method 2
attained the best accuracy of 93.53% and 91.11% for
mass/normal and microcalcification/normal using RILF
with (8,1) neighbourhood and two frequency channels.
T-test is used with a confidence level of 90% to determine
the two methods are significantly different. Any two
methods can be significantly different if p-value is less than
0.05. P-value is calculated by considering method 2 as
reference using T-test. From Tables 2 and 3, we can observe
p-values for mass/normal and microcalcification/normal.
These values imply that the best case methods of method 1
i.e., LTP and method 3 i.e., PSFTA are significantly
different from method 2 at 95% confidence level for
mass/normal. In case of microcalcification/normal, method
1 is significantly different from method 2 in calculating
accuracy and specificity but it is indifferent for sensitivity.
Method 3 is significantly different from method 2 in
calculating accuracy and sensitivity but it is indifferent for
specificity.

Table 1 Results of best methods of RILFMD, LBP and SFTA for mass/normal and microcalcification/normal

RILFMD with (8,1) neighbourhood and two low-frequency channels for microcalcification normal
Fold1 Fold 2 Fold 3 Fold 4 Fold 5 Fold 6 Fold 7 Fold 8 Fold9 Fold 10 Avg
Accuracy 93.78 92.87 91.15 91.67 91.24 90.54 89.95 89.89 89.91 90.06 91.11
Sensitivity 100 98.84 98.50 98.86 98.85 98.14 96.17 96.38 96.78 97.99 98.04
Specificity 82.19 82.13 82.52 82.27 80.26 80.59 80.53 80.12 80.66 80.66 81.17
RILFMD with (8,1) neighbourhood with two low frequency channels for mass/normal
Accuracy 93.75 93.05 93.29 93.53 93.87 93.93 93.98 93.72 93.30 92.92 93.53
Sensitivity 98.92 99.46 99.64 99.46 99.57 99.64 99.54 99.60 99.64 99.68 99.52
Specificity 89.57 87.88 88.18 88.74 89.27 89.34 89.49 88.97 88.18 87.47 88.71
LBP variant : uniform LTP with (8,1) neighbourhood for microcalcification/normal
Accuracy 86.42 88.85 88.25 87.79 87.27 87.02 88.01 88.36 88.13 87.90 87.80
Sensitivity 98.92 97.85 96.06 96.51 96.34 96.77 97.24 97.32 96.78 96.46 97.02
Specificity 69.57 76.64 77.67 76.00 75.00 73.85 75.52 76.23 76.41 76.31 75.31
LBP variant : uniform rotation invariant LQP with (12,2) neighbourhood for mass/normal
Accuracy 94.76 93.08 92.19 91.86 91.57 91.46 91.10 90.84 90.69 90.81 91.83
Sensitivity 98.94 99.47 99.64 99.20 99.36 99.28 99.23 99.19 98.69 98.61 99.16
Specificity 91.38 87.93 86.17 85.93 85.29 85.16 84.55 84.11 84.25 84.53 85.93
SFTA method: Pyramidal SFTA with nt=4 for microcalcification/normal
Accuracy 92.31 91.17 90.74 90.27 89.72 88.95 88.65 88.61 89.04 88.75 89.82
Sensitivity 90.32 91.94 91.76 91.69 92.70 91.41 91.26 91.55 91.54 91.85 91.60
Specificity 88.24 86.13 84.95 84.73 82.56 82.81 82.37 82.21 83.06 81.98 83.90
SFTA method: Pyramidal SFTA for mass/normal
Accuracy 92.43 92.41 92.56 91.99 91.86 91.74 91.35 91.59 91.94 92.12 91.98
Sensitivity 98.64 98.16 98.14 97.05 96.78 96.78 96.78 96.92 96.78 96.89 97.29
Specificity 87.48 87.98 87.73 87.50 87.29 87.89 87.70 87.70 87.82 87.85 87.69

Table 2 P-values for method 1 and best methods of LBP and Table 3 P-values for method 1 and best methods of LBP and
SFTA for mass/normal SFTA for microcalcification/normal

Method1: Method1:
RILFMD LQP SFTA pyramidal RILFMD LTP SFTA Pyramidal
Accuracy 2.147950902387617e-04 5.878239724561006e-10 Accuracy 2.565648424536226e-07 0.024439300047089
Sensitivity 0.005190864320234 5.259538042536624e-10 Sensitivity 0.292571618575745 3.882984228280946e-13
Specificity 5.125426209348066e-04 3.090083848066811e-06 Specificity 4.459507642243632e-08 0.094282813640476
 Comparison of rotation invariant local frequency, LBP and SFTA methods for breast abnormality classification 149
5.7 Discussion
Experiment results of three well-known techniques show
that RILF i.e., method 2 gives a highest accuracy. RILF not
only dominates in the number of features compared to LBP
and SFTA methods, but is also more robust to noise. This
robustness to noise is achieved by selection of low-
frequency channels which has maximum texture energy and
less noise information. In LBP methods, thresholding and
binomial factor 2n on neighbours compromise textural
information. To preserve this information in RILF method
the grey level values surrounding the centre pixel are
converted into the frequency domain. In LBP methods by
changing R and N values, the number of features
exponentially grows. However, in RILF method features
can be extracted at different scales with the same number of
features. In the case of SFTA method, local features of the
image are not considered, as the thresholding is performed
globally using Otsu’s method and a number of thresholds
are to be manually selected. We observed that in SFTA
method as the number of thresholds increases the
performance has been reduced drastically. Many cases were
unpredicted in SFTA method as no extra texture patterns
were identified with the increase in the number of
thresholds.
6 Conclusion
In this paper, we have extracted features using LBP, SFTA,
and RILF methods to distinguish normal and abnormal
(mass and microcalcifications) ROIs. Among these
methods, RILF works in the frequency domain and it does
not consider noise part of the image. This property adds to
RILF features to get high classification accuracy when
compared to LBP and SFTA methods. The evaluation of
these methods has been carried out using IRMA database.
RILF features achieved accuracy 93.53% and 91.11%,
sensitivity 99.51% and 98.04% and specificity 88.71% and
81.17% for mass/normal and microcalcification/normal
classification respectively. In summary, RILF has given best
accuracy, sensitivity and specificity when compared to other
methods. Further, in future, we would like to develop a new
feature vector which does three class study that classifies
normal, benign and malignant ROIs irrespective of the type
of abnormalities present in mammogram
References
Beheshti, S.M.A., Noubari, H.A., Fatemizadeh, E. and Khalili, M.
(2016) ‘Classification of abnormalities in mammograms by
new asymmetric fractal features’, Biocybernetics and
Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp.56–65.
Beura, S., Majhi, B. and Dash, R. (2015) ‘Automatic
characterization of mammograms using fractal texture
analysis and fast correlation based filter method’,
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on
Perception and Machine Intelligence, 26–27 February,
Kolkata, West Bengal.
Costa, A.F., Humpire-Mamani, G. and Machado Traina, A.J.
(2012) ‘An efficient algorithm for fractal analysis of textures’,
25th SIBGRAPI Conference on Graphics, Patterns and
Images, Washington DC, USA, pp.39–46.
de Nazare Silva, J., Carvalho Filho, A.O. Silva, A.C., De Paiva,
A.C. and Gattass, M. (2015) ‘Automatic detection of masses
in mammograms using quality threshold clustering,
correlogram function and SVM’, Journal of Digital Imaging,
Vol. 28, No. 3, pp.323–337.
de Oliveira, F.S.S., de Carvalho Filho, A.O., Silva, A.C.,
de Paiva, A.C. and Gattass, M. (2015) ‘Classification of
breast regions as mass and non-mass based on digital
mammograms using taxonomic indexes and SVM’,
Computers in Biology and Medicine, Vol. 57, pp.42–53.
Edward, J.K., Barnett, M.G. and Chytyk-Praznik, K. (2013)
‘Automatic detection of anomalies in screening
mammograms’, BMC Medical Imaging, Vol. 13, No. 1,
p.43.
Ergin, S. and Kilinc, K. (2014) ‘A new feature extraction
framework based on wavelets for breast cancer diagnosis’,
Computers in Biology and Medicine, Vol. 51, pp.171–182.
Ericeira, D.R., Silva, A.C., De Paiva, A.C. and Gattass, M. (2013)
‘Detection of masses based on asymmetric regions of digital
bilateral mammograms using spatial description with
variogram and cross-variogram functions’, Computers in
Biology and Medicine, Vol. 43, No. 8, pp.987–999.
Gedik, N. and Atasoy, A. (2013) ‘A computer-aided diagnosis
system for breast cancer detection by using a curvelet
transform’, Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp.1002–1014.
Gorgel, P., Sertbas, A. and Ucan, O.N. (2013) ‘Mammographical
mass detection and classification using local seed region
growing–spherical wavelet transform (LSRG–SWT) hybrid
scheme’, Computers in Biology and Medicine, Vol. 43, No. 6,
pp.765–774.
Guo, Y., Zhao, G. and PietikäInen, M. (2012) ‘Discriminative
features for texture description’, Pattern Recognition, Vol. 45,
No. 10, pp.3834–3843.
Hadjiiski, L., Sahiner, B. and Chan, H-P. (2006) ‘Advances in
CAD for diagnosis of breast cancer’, Current Opinion in
Obstetrics and Gynecology, Vol. 18, No. 1, p.64.
Liao, S., Zhu, X., Lei, Z., Zhang, L. and Li, S.Z. (2007) ‘Learning
multi-scale block local binary patterns for face recognition’,
International Conference on Biometrics 2007, 27 August,
Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp.828–837.
Lladó, X., Oliver A, Freixenet J, Martí R, Martí J. 2009)
‘A textural approach for mass false positive reduction
in mammography’. Computerized Medical Imaging and
Graphics, Vol. 33, No. 6, 1 September, pp.415–422.
Lladó, X., Oliver, A., Freixenet, J., Martí, R. and Martí, J. (2009)
‘A textural approach for mass false positive reduction in
mammography’, Computerized Medical Imaging and
Graphics, Vol. 33, No. 6, pp.415–422.
Masmoudi, A.D., Ayed, N.G.B., Masmoudi, D.S. and Abid, R.
(2015) ‘Robust mass classification–based local binary pattern
variance and shape descriptors’, International Journal of
Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering, Vol. 8, Nos. 1–2,
pp.20–27.
Mohanty, A.K., Senapati, M.R., Beberta, S. and Lenka, S.K.
(2013) ‘Texture-based features for classification of
mammograms using decision tree’, Neural Computing and
Applications, Vol. 23, Nos. 3–4, pp.1011–1017.
150 S. Paramkusham et al.
Nanni, L., Paci, M., Brahnam, S., Ghidoni, S. and Menegatti, E.
(2013) ‘Virus image classification using different texture
descriptors’, The 14th International Conference on
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BIOCOMP’13),
Las Vegas, NV.
Ojala, T., Valkealahti, K. and Oja, E. and Pietikäinen, M. (2001)
‘Texture discrimination with multidimensional distributions
of signed gray-level differences’, Pattern Recognition,
Vol. 34, No. 3, pp.727–739.
Paci, M., Nanni, L., Lahti, A., Aalto-Setala, K., Hyttinen, J. and
Severi, S. (2013) ‘Non-binary coding for texture descriptors
in sub-cellular and stem cell image classification’, Current
Bioinformatics, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp.208–219.
Rangayyan, R.M., Banik, S. and Leo Desautels, J.E. (2010)
‘Computer-aided detection of architectural distortion in prior
mammograms of interval cancer’, Journal of Digital Imaging,
Vo. 23, No. 5, pp.611–631.
Reyad, Y.A., Berbar, M.A. and Hussain, M. (2014) ‘Comparison
of statistical, LBP and multi-resolution analysis features for
breast mass classification’, Journal of Medical Systems,
Vol. 38, No. 9, pp.1–15.
Rouzbeh, M., Kalra, S. and Yang, Y-H. (2013) ‘Rotation invariant
local frequency descriptors for texture classification’, IEEE
Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 22, No. 6,
pp.2409–2419.
Salvado, J. and Roque, B. (2005) ‘Detection of calcifications in
digital mammograms using wavelet analysis and contrast
enhancement’, Intelligent Signal Processing, 2005 IEEE
International Workshop on, 1–3 September, Faro, Portugal.
View publication stats
Sharma, S. and Khanna, P. (2015) ‘Computer-aided diagnosis of
Malignant mammograms using Zernike moments and SVM’,
Journal of Digital Imaging, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp.77–90.
Suneeta, M., Lewis, S., Brennan, P., Noakes, J. and
Mello-Thoms, C. (2017) ‘The role of digital breast
tomosynthesis in the breast assessment clinic: a review’,
Journal of Medical Radiation Sciences, Vol. 64, 1 March,
pp.203–211.
Tiedeu, A., Daul, C., Kentsop, A., Graebling, P. and Wolf, D.
(2012) ‘Texture-based analysis of clustered
microcalcifications detected on mammograms’, Digital Signal
Processing, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp.124–132.
Timp, S., Varela, C. and Karssemeijer, N. (2007) ‘Temporal
change analysis for characterization of mass lesions in
mammography’, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging,
Vol. 26, No. 7, pp.945–953.
Vipparthi, S.K. and Nagar, S.K. (2015) ‘Directional local ternary
patterns for multimedia image indexing and retrieval’,
International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems
Engineering, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp.137–145.
Wajid, S.K. and Hussain, A. (2015) ‘Local energy-based shape
histogram feature extraction technique for breast cancer
diagnosis’, Expert Systems with Applications, Vol. 42, No. 20,
pp.6990–6999.
Wang, W., Chen, W. and Xu, D. (2011) ‘Pyramid-based multi-
scale LBP features for face recognition’, International
Conference on Multimedia and Signal Processing (CMSP),
Vol. 1, pp.151–155.