Of all the skin cancer that is prevalent, melanoma has the highest mortality rates. Melanoma becomes life threatening when it penetrates deep into the dermis layer unless detected at an early stage, it becomes fatal since it has a tendency to migrate to other parts of our body. This paper presents an automated non-invasive methodology to assist the clinicians and dermatologists for detection of melanoma. Unlike conventional computational methods which require (expensive) domain expertise for segmentation and hand crafted feature computation and/or selection, a deep convolutional neural network based regularized discriminant learning framework which extracts low dimensional discriminative features for melanoma detection is proposed. Our approach minimizes the whole of within-class variance information and maximizes the total class variance information. The importance of various subspaces arising in the within-class scatter matrix followed by dimensionality reduction using total class variance information are analyzed for melanoma detection. Experimental results on ISBI 2016, MED-NODE, PH2 and the recent ISBI 2017 databases show the efficacy of our proposed approach as compared to other state-of-the-art methodologies.
Traditional linear discriminant analysis (LDA) approach discards the eigenvalues which are very small or equivalent to zero, but quite often eigenvectors corresponding to zero eigenvalues are the important dimensions for discriminant analysis. We propose an objective function which would utilize both the principal as well as nullspace eigenvalues and simultaneously inherit the class separability information onto its latent space representation. The idea is to build a convolutional neural network (CNN) and perform the regularized discriminant analysis on top of this and train it in an end-to-end fashion. The backpropagation is performed with a suitable optimizer to update the parameters so that the whole CNN approach minimizes the within class variance and maximizes the total class variance information suitable for both multi-class and binary class classification problems. Experimental results on four databases for multiple computer vision classification tasks show the efficacy of our proposed approach as compared to other popular methods.
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