An enhanced technique of skin cancer classification using deep convolutional neural network with transfer learning models

Abstract Skin cancer is one of the top three perilous types of cancer caused by damaged DNA that can cause death. This damaged DNA begins cells to grow uncontrollably and nowadays it is getting increased speedily. There exist some researches for the computerized analysis of malignancy in skin lesion images. However, analysis of these images is very challenging having some troublesome factors like light reflections from the skin surface, variations in color illumination, different shapes, and sizes of the lesions. As a result, evidential automatic recognition of skin cancer is valuable to build up the accuracy and proficiency of pathologists in the early stages. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model based on deep learning approach for the accurate classification between benign and malignant skin lesions. In preprocessing we firstly, apply filter or kernel to remove noise and artifacts; secondly, normalize the input images and extract features that help for accurate classification; and finally, data augmentation increases the number of images that improves the accuracy of classification rate. To evaluate the performance of our proposed ,DCNN model is compared with some transfer learning models such as AlexNet, ResNet, VGG-16, DenseNet, MobileNet, etc. The model is evaluated on the HAM10000 dataset and ultimately we obtained the highest 93.16% of training and 91.93% of testing accuracy respectively. The final outcomes of our proposed DCNN model define it as more reliable and robust when compared with existing transfer learning models.