Classification of Skin Cancer Images using Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network

Skin is the most powerful shield human organ that protects the internal organs of the human body from external attacks. This important organ is attacked by a diverse range of microbes such as viruses, fungi, and bacteria causing a lot of damage to the skin. Apart from these microbes, even dust plays important role in damaging skin. Every year several people in the world are suffering from skin diseases. These skin diseases are contagious and spread very fast. There are varieties of skin diseases. Thus it requires a lot of practice to distinguish the skin disease by the doctor and provide treatment. In order to automate this process several deep learning models are used in recent past years. This paper demonstrates an efficient and lightweight modified SqueezeNet deep learning model on the HAM10000 dataset for skin cancer classification. This model has outperformed state-of-the-art models with fewer parameters. As compared to existing deep learning models, this SqueezeNet variant has achieved 99.7%, 97.7%, and 97.04% as train, validation, and test accuracies respectively using only 0.13 million parameters.