Automatic Detection of Melanoma with Yolo Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

In the past three years, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have achieved promising results in detecting skin cancer. However, improving the accuracy and efficiency of the automatic detection of melanoma is still urgent due to the visual similarity of benign and malignant dermoscopic images. There is also a need for fast and computationally effective systems for mobile applications targeting caregivers and homes. This paper presents the You Only Look Once (Yolo) algorithms, which are based on DCNNs applied to the detection of melanoma. The Yolo algorithms comprise YoloV1, YoloV2, and YoloV3, whose methodology first resets the input image size and then divides the image into several cells. According to the position of the detected object in the cell, the network will try to predict the bounding box of the object and the class confidence score. Our test results indicate that the mean average precision (mAP) of Yolo can exceed 0.82 with a training set of only 200 images, proving that this method has great advantages for detecting melanoma in lightweight system applications.