Performance Evaluation of Handcrafted Feature Descriptors with AdaBoost Classifier for Automated Skin Disease Diagnosis

The timely identification of dermatological diseases together with their precise diagnosis enables proper medical interventions that minimize further disease complications. The authors conduct a performance- based evaluation of AdaBoost classifier with handcrafted image features for automated skin disease classification systems. The researchers worked with a specific collection of 38,000 dermatological pictures which included ten different disease types from Melanoma to Eczema to Psoriasis to Fungal Infections. The research investigated six image feature extraction methods including Gabor Filter and JPEG Coefficient Filter (JPEGCF) and Pyramid Histogram of Oriented Gradients Filter (PHOGF) as well as Simple Color Histogram Filter (SCHF) and Fuzzy Color and Texture Histogram Filter (FCTH) with Fuzzy Opponent Histogram Filter (FOHF). The research used feature vectors extracted from AdaBoost classifiers in WEKA within 10-fold cross-validation procedures for training purposes. The evaluation metrics consisted of accuracy, precision, recall, ROC, PRC as well as training time. Within the examined models Gabor+AdaBoost demonstrated maximum rates of accuracy (97.78%) alongside precision (0.98) and recall (0.98) but it required the most execution time at 14.4s. When weighed against each other JPEGCF+AdaBoost maintained equivalent accuracy at 97.59% but required only 0.21 seconds to complete tasks thus earning status as a balanced choice for this system. SCHF+AdaBoost proved suitable for real-time operations by delivering 94.11% accuracy results within 0.06 seconds computing time. The study reveals that Gabor descriptors provide optimal predictive accuracy but JPEGCF along with SCHF demonstrate the best combination of performance with computational speed.