SUMMARY
The rise of incidences of melanoma skin cancer is a global health problem. Skin cancer, if diagnosed at an early stage, enhances the chances of a patient’s survival. Building an automated and effective melanoma classification system is the need of the hour. In this paper, an automated computer-based diagnostic system for melanoma skin lesion classification is presented using fine-tuned EfficientNetB3 model over ISIC 2017 dataset. To improve classification results, an automated image pre-processing phase is incorporated in this study, it can effectively remove noise artifacts such as hair structures and ink markers from dermoscopic images. Comparative analyses of various advanced models like ResNet50, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, and EfficientNetB0-B2 are conducted to corroborate the performance of the proposed model. The proposed system also addressed the issue of model overfitting and achieved a precision of 88.00%, an accuracy of 88.13%, recall of 88%, and F1-score of 88%.