Detection and classification of COVID-19 disease from X-ray images using convolutional neural networks and histogram of oriented gradients

COVID-19 is now regarded as the most lethal disease caused by the novel coronavirus disease of humans. The COVID-19 pandemic has spread to every country on the planet and has wreaked havoc on these countries by increasing the number of human deaths, and in addition, caused intense hunger, and lowered economic productivity. Due to a lack of sufficient radiologist, a restricted amount of COVID-19 test kits is available in hospitals, and this is also accompanied by a shortage of equipment due to the daily increase in cases, as a result of increase in the number of persons infected with COVID-19 . Even for experienced radiologists, examining chest X-rays is a difficult task. Many people have died as a result of inaccurate COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment, as well as ineffective detection measures. This paper, therefore presents a unique detection and classification approach (DCCNet) for quick diagnosis of COVID-19 using chest X-ray images of patients. To achieve quick diagnosis, a convolutional neural network (CNN) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) method is proposed in this paper to help medical experts diagnose COVID-19 disease. The diagnostic performance of the hybrid CNN model and HOG-based method was then evaluated using chest X-ray images collected from University of Gondar and online databases. The experiment was performed using Keras (with TensorFlow as a backend) and Python. After the DCCNet model was evaluated, a 99.9% training accuracy and 98.3% test accuracy was achieved, while a 100% training accuracy and 98.5% test accuracy was achieved using HOG. After the evaluation, the hybrid model achieved 99.97% and 99.67% training and testing accuracy for detection and classification of COVID-19 which was better by 1.37% compared to when features were extracted using CNN and 1.17% when HOG was used. The DCCNet achieved a result that outperformed state-of-the-art models by 6.7%.