Hybrid classification structures for automatic COVID-19 detection

This paper explores the issue of COVID-19 detection from X-ray images. X-ray images, in general, suffer from low quality and low resolution. That is why the detection of different diseases from X-ray images requires sophisticated algorithms. First of all, machine learning (ML) is adopted on the features extracted manually from the X-ray images. Twelve classifiers are compared for this task. Simulation results reveal the superiority of Gaussian process (GP) and random forest (RF) classifiers. To extend the feasibility of this study, we have modified the feature extraction strategy to give deep features. Four pre-trained models, namely ResNet50, ResNet101, Inception-v3 and InceptionResnet-v2 are adopted in this study. Simulation results prove that InceptionResnet-v2 and ResNet101 with GP classifier achieve the best performance. Moreover, transfer learning (TL) is also introduced in this paper to enhance the COVID-19 detection process. The selected classification hierarchy is also compared with a convolutional neural network (CNN) model built from scratch to prove its quality of classification. Simulation results prove that deep features and TL methods provide the best performance that reached 100% for accuracy.