RS-CA-HSICT: A Residual and Spatial Channel Augmented CNN Transformer Framework for Monkeypox Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces RS-CA-HSICT, a hybrid CNN-Transformer framework that combines residual, spatial, and attention mechanisms to improve Monkeypox detection with high accuracy and robustness.

Contribution

The novel RS-CA-HSICT architecture integrates CNN and Transformer modules with residual and spatial learning for enhanced feature extraction in Monkeypox detection.

Findings

Achieved up to 98.30% classification accuracy.

Outperformed existing CNN and ViT models.

Demonstrated robustness across diverse datasets.

Abstract

This work proposes a hybrid deep learning approach, namely Residual and Spatial Learning based Channel Augmented Integrated CNN-Transformer architecture, that leverages the strengths of CNN and Transformer towards enhanced MPox detection. The proposed RS-CA-HSICT framework is composed of an HSICT block, a residual CNN module, a spatial CNN block, and a CA, which enhances the diverse feature space, detailed lesion information, and long-range dependencies. The new HSICT module first integrates an abstract representation of the stem CNN and customized ICT blocks for efficient multihead attention and structured CNN layers with homogeneous (H) and structural (S) operations. The customized ICT blocks learn global contextual interactions and local texture extraction. Additionally, H and S layers learn spatial homogeneity and fine structural details by reducing noise and modeling complex morphological variations. Moreover, inverse residual learning enhances vanishing gradient, and stage-wise resolution reduction ensures scale invariance. Furthermore, the RS-CA-HSICT framework augments the learned HSICT channels with the TL-driven Residual and Spatial CNN maps for enhanced multiscale feature space capturing global and localized structural cues, subtle texture, and contrast variations. These channels, preceding augmentation, are refined through the Channel-Fusion-and-Attention block, which preserves discriminative channels while suppressing redundant ones, thereby enabling efficient computation. Finally, the spatial attention mechanism refines pixel selection to detect subtle patterns and intra-class contrast variations in Mpox. Experimental results on both the Kaggle benchmark and a diverse MPox dataset reported classification accuracy as high as 98.30% and an F1-score of 98.13%, which outperforms the existing CNNs and ViTs.