Improved PSO With Visit Table and Multiple Direction Search Strategies for Skin Cancer Image Segmentation

Automated screening is employed to assist skin specialists in accurately detecting skin lesions at an early stage. Multilevel thresholding is a widely popular and efficient technique for enhancing the classification of skin cancer images. This paper proposes improved PSO with a novel visit table and multiple directions search strategies to develop the performance of the multilevel thresholding. A visit table strategy has been developed that prevents unnecessary searches of the original particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm by allowing the discovery of new points by making fewer visits to frequently visited points and their neighbors. Besides, a multiple directions search strategy has been introduced for the PSO to increase the diversity of the population and overcome the stuck at the local optimum by enhancing exploration ability. The qualitative, quantitative, and scalability analyzes of the improved PSO (IPSO) method were carried out on 50 benchmark functions and the highest performance was achieved with the proposed method in most of these functions. Secondly, a multilevel image segmentation application is presented on skin cancer images using two-dimensional (2D) non-local means histograms, improved PSO and Renyi’s entropy. In this work, the ISIC 2017 skin cancer image dataset is used for segmentation application and various performance evaluation metrics are used. The obtained results are compared with seven state-of-the-art approaches to show the efficiency of the proposed approach. It can be noted from the obtained results that, the proposed method outperforms the compared method based on the average of evaluation metrics for all skin cancer images. The best results in SSIM value of 0.8285, FSIM value of 0.7332, and PSNR value of 19.0576 are achieved by using the proposed method in skin cancer image segmentation. Hence, our proposed method is ready to be tested with huge databases and can aid skin specialists in making an accurate diagnosis.