Novel COVID-19 Recognition Framework Based on Conic Functions Classifier

Abstract

The new coronavirus has been declared as a global emergency. The first case was officially declared in Wuhan, China, during the end of 2019. Since then, the virus has spread to nearly every continent, and case numbers continue to rise. The scientists and engineers immediately responded to the virus and presented techniques, devices and treatment approaches to fight back and eliminate the virus. Machine learning is a popular scientific tool and is applied to several medical image recognition problems, involving tumour recognition, cancer detection, organ transplantation and COVID-19 diagnosis. It is proved that machine learning presents robust, fast and accurate results in various medical image recognition problems. Generally, machine learning-based frameworks consist of two stages: feature extraction and classification. In the feature extraction, overwhelmingly unsupervised learning techniques are applied to reduce the input data’s size. This step extracts appropriate features by reducing the computational time and increasing the performance of the classifiers. A classifier is the second step that aims to categorise the input. Within the proposed step, the unsupervised part relies on the feature extraction by using local binary patterns (LBP), followed by feature selection relying on factor analysis technique. The LBP is a kind of visual descriptor, mainly applied for image recognition problem. The aim of using LBP is to analyse the input COVID-19 image and extract salient features. Furthermore, factor analysis is a statistical technique applied to define variability among observed variables in less unnoticed variables named factors. The factor analysis applied to the LBP wavelet aims to select sensitive features from input data (LBP output) and reduce the size input. In the last stage, conic functions classifier is applied to classify two sets of data, categorising the extracted features by using LBP and factor analysis as positive or negative COVID-19 cases. The proposed solution aims to diagnose COVID-19 by using LBP and factor analysis, based on conic functions classifier. The conic functions classifier presents remarkable results compared with these popular classifiers and state-of-the-art studies presented in the literature. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.