Acceleration of Hyperspectral Skin Cancer Image Classification through Parallel Machine-Learning Methods

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has become a very compelling technique in different scientific areas; indeed, many researchers use it in the fields of remote sensing, agriculture, forensics, and medicine. In the latter, HSI plays a crucial role as a diagnostic support and for surgery guidance. However, the computational effort in elaborating hyperspectral data is not trivial. Furthermore, the demand for detecting diseases in a short time is undeniable. In this paper, we take up this challenge by parallelizing three machine-learning methods among those that are the most intensively used: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) algorithms using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to accelerate the classification of hyperspectral skin cancer images. They all showed a good performance in HS image classification, in particular when the size of the dataset is limited, as demonstrated in the literature. We illustrate the parallelization techniques adopted for each approach, highlighting the suitability of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to this aim. Experimental results show that parallel SVM and XGB algorithms significantly improve the classification times in comparison with their serial counterparts.