Classification of Skin Disease Using Transfer Learning in Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Automatic classification of skin disease plays an important role in healthcare especially in dermatology. Dermatologists can determine different skin diseases with the help of an android device and with the use of Artificial Intelligence. Deep learning requires a lot of time to train due to the number of sequential layers and input data involved. Powerful computer involving a Graphic Processing Unit is an ideal approach to the training process due to its parallel processing capability. This study gathered images of 7 types of skin disease prevalent in the Philippines for a skin disease classification system. There are 3400 images composed of different skin diseases like chicken pox, acne, eczema, Pityriasis rosea, psoriasis, Tinea corporis and vitiligo that was used for training and testing of different convolutional network models. This study used transfer learning to skin disease classification using pre-trained weights from different convolutional neural network models such as VGG16, VGG19, MobileNet, ResNet50, InceptionV3, Inception-ResNetV2, Xception, DenseNet121, DenseNet169, DenseNet201 and NASNet mobile. The MobileNet model achieved the highest accuracy, 94.1% and the VGG16 model achieved the lowest accuracy, 44.1%.