Deep Learning Based Skin Lesion Segmentation and Classification of Melanoma Using Support Vector Machine (SVM)

Objective: The main objective of this study is to improve the classification performance of melanoma using deep learning based automatic skin lesion segmentation. It can be assist medical experts on early diagnosis of melanoma on dermoscopy images. Methods: First A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based U-net algorithm is used for segmentation process. Then extract color, texture and shape features from the segmented image using Local Binary Pattern ( LBP), Edge Histogram (EH), Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and Gabor method. Finally all the features extracted from these methods were fed into the Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Naïve Bayes (NB) classifiers to diagnose the skin image which is either melanoma or benign lesions. Results: Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The Dice co-efficiency value of 77.5% is achieved for image segmentation and SVM classifier produced 85.19% of accuracy. Conclusion: In deep learning environment, U-Net segmentation algorithm is found to be the best method for segmentation and it helps to improve the classification performance.