Abstract: A method of determining the skin-line in a digital medical image comprising the steps of:providing a digital medical image including a matrix of lines and columns of pixels;determining the minimum gray level of the background pixels using a background detection routine;selecting all or at least a representative sample of said lines and/or columns of said image, and for each selected line or column;smoothing the line to minimize the effect of noise on the delineation of pixel gray level transitions;identifying significant transitions from segments of monotonically decreasing gray level values that span a minimum gray level range and start near or above said minimum background gray level;computing a set of features for each identified significant transition; andbased on the set of features computed for each of the identified significant transitions, classifying the transition as either a skin-line transition or as a non-skin-line transition.