Acne scarring occurs in 95% of
people with acne vulgaris due to collagen loss or gains when the body
is healing the damages of the skin caused by acne inflammation. Accurate
classification of acne scars is a vital factor in providing a timely,
effective treatment protocol. Dermatologists mainly recognize the type
of acne scars manually based on visual inspections, which are time- and
energy-consuming and subject to intra- and inter-reader variability. In
this paper, a novel automated acne scar classification system is
proposed based on a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model.
First, a dataset of 250 images from five different classes is collected
and labeled by four well-experienced dermatologists. The pre-processed
input images are fed into our proposed model, namely
ScarNet
, for deep feature map extraction. The optimizer, loss function,
activation functions, filter and kernel sizes, regularization methods,
and the batch size of the proposed architecture are tuned so that the
classification performance is maximized while minimizing the
computational cost. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of
the proposed method with accuracy, specificity, and kappa score of
92.53%, 95.38%, and 76.7%, respectively.