Skin Disease Classification from Image - A Survey

Skin diseases are one of the most common types of health illnesses faced by the people for ages. The identification of skin disease mostly relies on the expertise of the doctors and skin biopsy results, which is a time-consuming process. An automated computer-based system for skin disease identification and classification through images is needed to improve the diagnostic accuracy as well as to handle the scarcity of human experts. Classification of skin disease from an image is a crucial task and highly depends on the features of the diseases considered in order to classify it correctly. Many skin diseases have highly similar visual characteristics, which add more challenges to the selection of useful features from the image. The accurate analysis of such diseases from the image would improve the diagnosis, accelerates the diagnostic time and leads to better and cost-effective treatment for patients. This paper presents the survey of different methods and techniques for skin disease classification namely; traditional or handcrafted feature-based as well as deep learning-based techniques.