Skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed and reported malignancy worldwide. To reduce the death rate from cancer, it is essential to diagnose skin cancer at a benign stage as soon as possible. To save lives, an automated system that can detect skin cancer in its earliest stages is necessary. For the diagnosis of skin cancer, various researchers have performed tasks using deep learning and transfer learning models. However, the existing literature is limited in terms of its accuracy and its troublesome and time-consuming process. As a result, it is critical to design an automatic system that can deliver a fast judgment and considerably reduce mistakes in diagnosis. In this work, a deep learning-based model has been designed for the identification of skin cancer at benign and malignant stages using the concept of transfer learning approach. For this, a pre-trained VGG16 model is improved by adding one flatten layer, two dense layers with activation function (LeakyReLU) and another dense layer with activation function (sigmoid) to enhance the accuracy of this model. This proposed model is evaluated on a dataset obtained from Kaggle. The techniques of data augmentation are applied in order to enhance the random-ness among the input dataset for model stability. The proposed model has been validated by considering several useful hyper parameters such as different batch sizes of 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128; different epochs and optimizers. The proposed model is working best with an overall accuracy of 89.09% on 128 batch size with the Adam optimizer and 10 epochs and outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. This model will help dermatologists in the early diagnosis of skin cancers.
Keywords: Kaggle; VGG16; benign; classification; convolutional neural network; data augmentation; malignant; skin cancer.