COMPARISON OF VISION TRANSFORMERS AND CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS FOR SKIN DISEASE CLASSIFICATION

Skin diseases are one of the most common diseases in humans. Due to its many various symptoms and types, computer vision studies have been frequently applied to its diagnosis and classification. Previous studies have frequently used machine learning methods and deep learning-based Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for skin disease diagnosis. Although deep learning-based applications have achieved great success in terms of detection accuracy, research continues to ensure the desired performance. However, Vision Transformer (ViT), recently proposed as a competitive alternative to CNNs, is gaining increasing popularity. This paper compares ResNet18 and ResNet50 networks, important CNN models, with ViT for classifying skin disease. The comparison is applied on a dataset containing a small number of samples. In the application performed on a dataset containing skin disease images, ViT provides 68.93% classification accuracy, while ResNet18 and ResNet50 classification accuracy is 61.65% and 61.17%, respectively. Other metrics calculated along with the accuracies also prove the superiority of ViT over ResNet models. However, ViT has a big disadvantage in terms of training time.