Optimised deep learning features for improved melanoma detection

In this article, we are addressing the question of effective usage of the feature set extracted from deep learning models pre-trained on ImageNet. Exploring this option will offer very fast and attractive alternative to transfer learning strategies. The traditional task of skin lesion recognition consists of several stages, where the automated system is typically trained on preprocessed images with known diagnosis, which allows classification of new samples to predefined categories. For this task, we are proposing here an improved melanoma detection method based on the combination of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and the features extracted from the deep learning approach. We are examining the usage of the LDA approach on activation of the fully-connected layer of deep learning in order to increase the classification accuracy and at the same time to reduce the feature space dimensionality. We tested our method on five different classifiers and evaluated results using various metrics. The presented comparison demonstrates the very high effectiveness of the suggested feature reduction, which leads not only to the significant lowering of employed features but also to the increasing performance of all tested classifiers in almost all measured characteristics.