Visual saliency based global-local feature representation for skin cancer classification

Abstract

With the rapid increase in the cases of deadly skin cancer, the classification on different types of skin cancer has been emerging as one of the most significant issues in the field of medical image. Several approaches have been proposed to help in diagnosing the categories of the skin lesions by means of traditional features or leveraging the widely used deep learning models. However, there are lack of the integrated frameworks to combine the hand-crafted traditional features and the deep Conv-features. Furthermore, the effective way to extract global and local features is also conducive to distinguish the specific lesions from normal skin. Hence, in this study, the authors present an integrated model to acquire more representative global-local features including the traditional local binary pattern features and deep Conv-features. In addition, several fusion strategies have conducted on the Global-DNN and Local-DNN for better performance. In order to extract more explicit features from the specific lesion areas, a target segmentation method based on visual saliency detection is employed to eliminate the background interference. Experimental results on ISIC-2017 skin cancer dataset demonstrate that the proposed Global-DNN and Global-Local models can obtain more effective feature representation which achieve outperformed results for skin cancer classification.