PCA: Progressive class-wise attention for skin lesions diagnosis

Asim Naveed, Syed Saud Naqvi, Tariq Mahmood Khan, Imran Razzak

Abstract: Highlights•A novel attention based mechanism is proposed for skin lesions classification.•The problem of significant intra-class variance, high inter-class similarity, and class imbalance is addressed by a class-wise attention mechanism.•The important features for the classification are extracted without the burden of additional parameters using a progressive class-wise attention mechanism.•The final three layers of the baseline model are discarded and the global average pooling (GAP) and classification output layers are added to reduce the number of parameters, while maintaining performance.•The proposed network is robust, end-to-end trainable and has good generalization on unseen data.