Image Enhancement CNN Approach to COVID-19 Detection Using Chest X-ray Images

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a fast-spreading virus-related disease. On 28 March 2022, Worldometer (COVID-19 live update) reported that there were about 482,338,923 COVID-19 cases and 6,149,387 fatalities worldwide. Moreover, there were about 416,884,712 recovered patients. The primary clinical mechanism currently utilized for COVID-19 identification is the Reverse Transcription–Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR). Hospitals only have small quantities of COVID-19 test kits available due to the daily increase in cases. As an alternative diagnosis possibility, an automatic detection system was implemented. A vigorous technique for the automatic COVID-19 identification is the deep learning approach. Chest X-ray (CXR) imaging is a modest tool that can be an alternate for diagnosing COVID-19-infected patients. With the use of deep learning, deep layer characteristics that are hidden from human sight may be observed using CXR imaging. One of the largest public databases, the “COVID-19 Radiography Database”, comprises 21,164 CXR images and was taken from Kaggle. To achieve the best accuracy in this work, data cleansing and the balanced dataset approach were applied. The primary goal of data cleansing is to remove duplicate CXR images from the database. The accuracy of three distinct pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) was compared and then analyzed (Xception, InceptionV3, and MobileNetV2). Among other models, Xception achieved the best testing accuracy of 94.13% with plain lung CXR pictures. The Gabor filtering image enhancement approach was also employed to identify COVID-19. Only for the MobileNetV2 model did enhance CXR images perform significantly better for classification than plain lung CXR images. This study attempts to enhance the system’s accuracy to 100%, outperforming previous tests.