Multiclass skin lesion classification using image augmentation technique and transfer learning models

PurposeThe mortality rate due to skin cancers has been increasing over the past decades. Early detection and treatment of skin cancers can save lives. However, due to visual resemblance of normal skin and lesion and blurred lesion borders, skin cancer diagnosis has become a challenging task even for skilled dermatologists. Hence, the purpose of this study is to present an image-based automatic approach for multiclass skin lesion classification and compare the performance of various models.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors have presented a multiclass skin lesion classification approach based on transfer learning of deep convolutional neural network. The following pre-trained models have been used: VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, ResNet101, ResNet152, Xception, MobileNet and compared their performances on skin cancer classification.FindingsThe experiments have been performed on HAM10000 dataset, which contains 10,015 dermoscopic images of seven skin lesion classes. The categorical accuracy of 83.69%, Top2 accuracy of 91.48% and Top3 accuracy of 96.19% has been obtained.Originality/valueEarly detection and treatment of skin cancer can save millions of lives. This work demonstrates that the transfer learning can be an effective way to classify skin cancer images, providing adequate performance with less computational complexity.