Improving the classification accuracy of melanoma detection by performing feature selection using binary Harris hawks optimization algorithm

Out of the various types of skin cancers, melanoma is observed to be the most malignant and fatal type. Early detection of melanoma increases the chances of survival which necessitates the need to develop an intelligent classifier that classifies the dermoscopic images accurately as melanoma or non-melanoma. Features extracted from an image have a major impact on the performance of a classifier. In this paper, handcrafted feature extraction techniques are used to extract features from dermoscopic images. It is quite possible that not all the features extracted from dermoscopic images contribute in the process of classification which imposes the need of selection of significant features from the feature set. Here, two binary variants of Harris Hawk Optimization (HHO) algorithm namely BHHO-S and BHHO-V are presented that employ S-shaped and V-shaped transfer functions with time-dependent behavior, respectively, for feature selection. The selected features are given to a classifier that classifies the dermoscopic image as melanoma or non-melanoma. Comparison of the performance of the proposed methods is done with existing metaheuristic algorithms. The results obtained after experimentation show the superiority of classifier that uses features selected using BHHO-S over BHHO-V and the classifiers that use existing state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. The experimental results also reveal that texture features extracted using local binary pattern along with color features provides higher classification accuracy as compared to global and other local texture feature extraction techniques.