Robust Ulcer Classification: Contrast and Illumination Invariant Approach

Gastrointestinal (GI) disease cases are on the rise throughout the world. Ulcers, being the most common type of GI disease, if left untreated, can cause internal bleeding resulting in anemia and bloody vomiting. Early detection and classification of different types of ulcers can reduce the death rate and severity of the disease. Manual detection and classification of ulcers are tedious and error-prone. This calls for automated systems based on computer vision techniques to detect and classify ulcers in images and video data. A major challenge in accurate detection and classification is dealing with the similarity among classes and the poor quality of input images. Improper contrast and illumination reduce the anticipated classification accuracy. In this paper, contrast and illumination invariance was achieved by utilizing log transformation and power law transformation. Optimal values of the parameters for both these techniques were achieved and combined to obtain the fused image dataset. Augmentation was used to handle overfitting and classification was performed using the lightweight and efficient deep learning model MobilNetv2. Experiments were conducted on the KVASIR dataset to assess the efficacy of the proposed approach. An accuracy of 96.71% was achieved, which is a considerable improvement over the state-of-the-art techniques.