A hybrid system for skin lesion detection: Based on gabor wavelet and support vector machine

© 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, London. Severe melanoma is potentially life-threatening. A novel methodology for automatic feature extraction from histo-pathological images and subsequent classification is presented. The proposed automated system uses a number of features extracted from images of skin lesions through image processing techniques which consisted of a spatially winner and adaptive median filter then applied Gabor filter bank to improve diagnostic accuracy. Histogram equalization to enhance the contrast of the images prior to segmentation is used. Then, a wavelet approach is used to extract the features; more specifically Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT). This article introduces a novel melanoma detection strategy using a hybrid particle swarm - based support vector machine (SVM–WLG–PSO) technique. The extracted features are reduced by using a particle swarm optimization (PSO), this was used to optimize the SVM parameters as a feature selection and finally, the obtained statistics are fed to a support vector machine (SVM) binary classifier to diagnose skin biopsies from patients as either malignant melanoma or benign nevi. The obtained classification accuracies show better performance in comparison to similar approaches for feature extraction. The proposed system is able to achieve one of the best results with classification accuracy of 87.13%, sensitivity of 94.1% and specificity of 80.22%