New pyramidal hybrid textural and deep features based automatic skin cancer classification model: Ensemble DarkNet and textural feature extractor

Abstract: Background: Skin cancer is one of the widely seen cancer worldwide and automatic classification of skin cancer can be benefited dermatology clinics for an accurate diagnosis. Hence, a machine learning-based automatic skin cancer detection model must be developed. Material and Method: This research interests to overcome automatic skin cancer detection problem. A colored skin cancer image dataset is used. This dataset contains 3297 images with two classes. An automatic multilevel textural and deep features-based model is presented. Multilevel fuse feature generation using discrete wavelet transform (DWT), local phase quantization (LPQ), local binary pattern (LBP), pre-trained DarkNet19, and DarkNet53 are utilized to generate features of the skin cancer images, top 1000 features are selected threshold value-based neighborhood component analysis (NCA). The chosen top 1000 features are classified using the 10-fold cross-validation technique. Results: To obtain results, ten-fold cross-validation is used and 91.54% classification accuracy results are obtained by using the recommended pyramidal hybrid feature generator and NCA selector-based model. Further, various training and testing separation ratios (90:10, 80:20, 70:30, 60:40, 50:50) are used and the maximum classification rate is calculated as 95.74% using the 90:10 separation ratio. Conclusions: The findings and accuracies calculated are denoted that this model can be used in dermatology and pathology clinics to simplify the skin cancer detection process and help physicians.