Effective detection of Covid-19 using Xception net architecture: A technical investigation using X-ray images

The disastrous era of COVID-19 has altered the perspectives of nearly all nations concerning the health and education sectors. Artificial intelligence is a pressing need that needs to be implemented thoroughly in the medical and educational fields. Imperatively, the diagnosis of Covid-19 has become crucial. In this study, we have designed a classification model based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and transfer learning. The COVID-19 chest X-ray images have been considered for the proposed methodology and are classified as COVID-19 positive and normal cases. The proposed shallow CNN Model achieved an accuracy of 96%, which is computationally very effective as only three Convolutional blocks are required. Then, the Xception architecture-based model is experimented with. The accuracy and loss of the proposed model have been evaluated using Adam and SGD optimizer. With the Adam Optimizer, Xception Net achieved the best classification accuracy of 99.94%. The precision, recall, and f₁-score of 100% are achieved. The proposed model has outperformed the previous studies in the same domain, which highlights the model's state-of-the-art performance. Our study will be helpful for decision-makers and can help further minimize mortality and morbidity by effectively diagnosing the disease.