Classification of COVID-19 Chest X-Ray Images Based on Speeded Up Robust Features and Clustering-Based Support Vector Machines

Abstract Due to the worldwide deficiency of medical test kits and the significant time required by radiology experts to identify the new COVID-19, it is essential to develop fast, robust, and intelligent chest X-ray (CXR) image classification system. The proposed method consists of two major components: feature extraction and classification. The Bag of image features algorithm creates visual vocabulary from two training data categories of chest X-ray images: Normal and COVID-19 patients’ datasets. The algorithm extracts salient features and descriptors from CXR images using the Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) algorithm. Machine learning with the Clustering-Based Support Vector Machines (CB-SVMs) multiclass classifier is trained using SURF features to classify the CXR image categories. The careful collection of ground truth Normal and COVID-19 CXR datasets, provided by worldwide expert radiologists, has certainly influenced the performance of the proposed CB-SVMs classifier to preserve the generalization capabilities. The high classification accuracy of 99 % demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method, where the accuracy is assessed on an independent test sets.