Microscopic melanoma detection and classification: A framework of pixel-based fusion and multilevel features reduction

The numbers of diagnosed patients by melanoma are drastic and contribute more deaths annually among young peoples. An approximately 192,310 new cases of skin cancer are diagnosed in 2019, which shows the importance of automated systems for the diagnosis process. Accordingly, this article presents an automated method for skin lesions detection and recognition using pixel-based seed segmented images fusion and multilevel features reduction. The proposed method involves four key steps: (a) mean-based function is implemented and fed input to top-hat and bottom-hat filters which later fused for contrast stretching, (b) seed region growing and graph-cut method-based lesion segmentation and fused both segmented lesions through pixel-based fusion, (c) multilevel features such as histogram oriented gradient (HOG), speeded up robust features (SURF), and color are extracted and simple concatenation is performed, and (d) finally variance precise entropy-based features reduction and classification through SVM via cubic kernel function. Two different experiments are performed for the evaluation of this method. The segmentation performance is evaluated on PH2, ISBI2016, and ISIC2017 with an accuracy of 95.86, 94.79, and 94.92%, respectively. The classification performance is evaluated on PH2 and ISBI2016 dataset with an accuracy of 98.20 and 95.42%, respectively. The results of the proposed automated systems are outstanding as compared to the current techniques reported in state of art, which demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.