Detecting COVID-19 from Chest X-Ray Images using a Lightweight Deep Transfer Learning Model with Improved Contrast Enhancement Technique
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2021
Abstract
Despite the vaccinations; the emergence of new and more contagious variants of the COVID-19 disease has continued to pose threats and challenges to our lives. Until herd immunity is achieved; it is important to continuously perform screening tests to control and minimize the transmissions. Due to the reported shortcomings of the RT-PCR; the utilization of deep learning for detecting COVID-19 from Chest X-Ray (CXR) images has gathered a lot of interest from researchers. As a contribution to the field; this study proposes a deep learning pipeline that utilizes transfer learning and image enhancement techniques to classify whether a given CXR image exhibits characteristics of COVID-19 infection; pneumonia infection; or normal/healthy lungs. For a lighter approach; the small pre-trained model named EfficientNetB0 is used as the base model for the transfer learning method. To improve the network’s performance; a sequence of contrast enhancement techniques namely the Multi-Scale Retinex (MSR) and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) is introduced in the pipeline and employed as a pre-processing step. Gathered from a 10-fold cross-validation method in a dataset with 3729 images per class; results show that the proposed approach achieves an average overall accuracy of 92.089% with 98.431% average precision; 95.119% average recall; and 96.741% average f1-score for the COVID-19 class.
Recommended Citation
Bacad, D. J. A., & Angela R. Abu, P. (2021). Detecting COVID-19 from chest x-ray images using a lightweight deep transfer learning model with improved contrast enhancement technique. 2021 3rd International Conference on Electrical, Control and Instrumentation Engineering (ICECIE), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECIE52348.2021.9664676
