An automated COVID-19 detection based on fused dynamic exemplar pyramid feature extraction and hybrid feature selection using deep learning.

The new coronavirus disease known as COVID-19 is currently a pandemic that is spread out the whole world. Several methods have been presented to detect COVID-19 disease. Computer vision methods have been widely utilized to detect COVID-19 by using chest X-ray and computed tomography (CT) images. This work introduces a model for the automatic detection of COVID-19 using CT images. A novel handcrafted feature generation technique and a hybrid feature selector are used together to achieve better performance. The primary goal of the proposed framework is to achieve a higher classification accuracy than convolutional neural networks (CNN) using handcrafted features of the CT images. In the proposed framework, there are four fundamental phases, which are preprocessing, fused dynamic sized exemplars based pyramid feature generation, ReliefF, and iterative neighborhood component analysis based feature selection and deep neural network classifier. In the preprocessing phase, CT images are converted into 2D matrices and resized to 256 × 256 sized images. The proposed feature generation network uses dynamic-sized exemplars and pyramid structures together. Two basic feature generation functions are used to extract statistical and textural features. The selected most informative features are forwarded to artificial neural networks (ANN) and deep neural network (DNN) for classification. ANN and DNN models achieved 94.10% and 95.84% classification accuracies respectively. The proposed fused feature generator and iterative hybrid feature selector achieved the best success rate, according to the results obtained by using CT images.