Detection and Classification of COVID-19 Disease from X-ray Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Histogram of Oriented Gradients

Abstract

COVID-19 is now regarded as the most lethal disease caused by the novel coronavirus diseases for humans. The COVID-19 pandemic has spread to every country on the planet and has wreaked havoc on them by increasing the number of human deaths, caused intense hunger, and lowered economic productivity. Also due to a lack of sufficient radiologist, restricted amount of COVID-19 test kits available in hospitals, and a shortage of equipment due to the daily increase in cases, the number of persons infected with COVID-19 has increased. Even for experienced radiologists, examining chest X-rays is a difficult task. Many people have died as a result of inaccurate COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment, as well as ineffective detection measures. This paper therefore presents a unique detection and classification approach (DCCNet) for quick diagnosis of COVID-19 using chest X-ray images of patients. To achieve quick diagnosis, a convolutional neural network (CNN) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) method is proposed in this paper to help medical experts diagnose COVID-19 disease. The diagnostic performance of the hybrid CNN model and HOG-based method was then evaluated using chest X-ray images collected from University of Gondar and online databases. This was achieved using Keras (with TensorFlow as a backend) and Python. After the DCCNet model was evaluated, a 99.9% training accuracy and 98.3% test accuracy was achieved, while a 100% training accuracy and 98.5% test accuracy was achieved using HOG. After evaluation, the hybrid model achieved 99.97% and 99.67% training and testing accuracy for detection and classification of COVID-19 which was better by 1.37% than when feature extraction was performed using CNN and 1.17% when HOG was used. The DCCNet produced a result that outperformed state-of-the-art models by 6.7%.