Deep learning for skin melanoma classification using dermoscopic images in different color spaces

Abstract

Skin cancer begins in the skin cells. The damage to the skin cells can cause genetic mutations that lead to uncontrolled growth and the formation of tumors. It is estimated that millions of people are diagnosed with skin cancer of different kinds each year. The earlier a skin cancer is diagnosed, the better the patient's prognosis and the lower their chance of complications. In this work, an efficient deep learning classification (EDLCS) to classify dermoscopic images is developed. The importance of color in the diagnosis of skin melanoma has caused color analysis to attract considerable attention from researchers of image-based skin melanoma analysis. Three different color spaces such as red-green-blue (RGB), hue-saturation-lightness (HIS) and LAB are investigated in this study. The obtained dermoscopic images are in RGB color space. The RGB dermoscopic images are first converted into HSV and LAB spaces to investigate the HSV and LAB color spaces for melanoma classification. Then, the color space converted image is fed to the proposed EDLCS to evaluate their performances. Results show that the proposed EDLCS provides 99.58% accuracy while using the LAB color model to classify preprocessed images while other models provide 99.17%.