MULTI-SCALE NEURAL NETWORK-BASED CLASSIFICATION METHOD FOR SKIN PATHOLOGICAL IMAGES

Skin pathological images contain essential diagnostic information across various scales. To effectively utilize multi-scale features, this study proposes a classification method based on multi-scale neural networks. The method involves a variable multi-scale neural network structure with a backbone network and multiple scale input branches inserted at different layers, facilitating feature extraction and fusion. Two search algorithms – a minimum cost-based search algorithm and a hill-climbing search algorithm – are introduced to identify the optimal network structure. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multi-scale network outperforms original networks in skin pathological image classification and that both search algorithms efficiently find near-optimal structures with reduced computational costs.