Leveraging Convolutional Block Attention Module (Cbam) For Enhanced Performance In Mobilenetv3-Based Skin Cancer Classification

As the incidence of skin cancer continues to rise globally, effective automated classification methods become crucial for early detection and timely intervention. Lightweight neural networks such as MobileNetV3 offer promising solutions due to their minimal parameters, making them suitable for environment with low resource. This study aims to develop an automated multiclass skin cancer classification system by enhancing MobileNetV3 with the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM). The primary goal is to achieve high classification accuracy without significantly increasing computational demands. We employed Bayesian optimization to automatically fine-tune model parameters and applied targeted data augmentation techniques to address class imbalance. CBAM was integrated to highlight diagnostically relevant regions within images. The proposed method was evaluated using the ISIC 2024 SLICE-3D dataset, which includes over 400,000 dermatoscopic images categorized into benign, basal cell carcinoma, melanoma, and squamous cell carcinoma classes. Preprocessing involved standardized resizing, normalization, and extensive geometric and photometric augmentations. Results demonstrated that our method achieved an accuracy of 98.97%, precision of 98.99%, recall of 98.97%, and an F1-score of 98.98%, surpassing previous state-of-the-art models by 1.86–6.52%. Remarkably, this improvement was achieved with minimal additional parameters due to the effective integration of CBAM. These results represent an advancement in automated medical image analysis, particularly for low resource settings, by combining lightweight CNNs with attention mechanisms and systematic hyperparameter exploration.