Melanoma Skin Cancer Detection Using Image Processing and Machine Learning Techniques

In humans, skin cancer is the most common and severe type of cancer. Melanoma is a deadly type of skin cancer. If it identifies early stages, it can be easily cured. The formal method for diagnosing melanoma detection is the biopsy method. This method can be a very painful one and a time-consuming process. This study gives a computer-aided detection system for the early identification of melanoma. In this study, image processing techniques and the Support vector machine (SVM) algorithms are used to introduce an efficient diagnosing system. The affected skin image is taken, and it sent under several pre-processing techniques for getting the enhanced image and smoothed image. Then the image is sent through the segmentation process using morphological and thresholding methods. Some essential texture, color and shape features of the skin images are extracted. Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) methodology is used for extracting texture features. These extracted GLCM, color and shape features are given as input to the SVM classifier. It classifies the given image into malignant melanoma or benign melanoma. High accuracy of 83% is achieved when we combine and apply the shape, color and GLCM features to the classifier.