Construction of saliency map and hybrid set of features for efficient segmentation and classification of skin lesion

Skin cancer is being a most deadly type of cancers which have grown extensively worldwide from the last decade. For an accurate detection and classification of melanoma, several measures should be considered which include, contrast stretching, irregularity measurement, selection of most optimal features, and so forth. A poor contrast of lesion affects the segmentation accuracy and also increases classification error. To overcome this problem, an efficient model for accurate border detection and classification is presented. The proposed model improves the segmentation accuracy in its preprocessing phase, utilizing contrast enhancement of lesion area compared to the background. The enhanced 2D blue channel is selected for the construction of saliency map, at the end of which threshold function produces the binary image. In addition, particle swarm optimization (PSO) based segmentation is also utilized for accurate border detection and refinement. Few selected features including shape, texture, local, and global are also extracted which are later selected based on genetic algorithm with an advantage of identifying the fittest chromosome. Finally, optimized features are later fed into the support vector machine (SVM) for classification. Comprehensive experiments have been carried out on three datasets named as PH2, ISBI2016, and ISIC (i.e., ISIC MSK-1, ISIC MSK-2, and ISIC UDA). The improved accuracy of 97.9, 99.1, 98.4, and 93.8%, respectively obtained for each dataset. The SVM outperforms on the selected dataset in terms of sensitivity, precision rate, accuracy, and FNR. Furthermore, the selection method outperforms and successfully removed the redundant features.