Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer and it is diagnosed mainly visually, starting from initial clinical screening and followed by dermoscopic analysis, biopsy and histopathological examination. A dermatologist’s recognition of melanoma may be subject to errors and may take some time to diagnose it. In this regard, deep learning can be useful in the study and classification of skin cancer. In particular, by classifying images with Deep Neural Network methodologies, it is possible to obtain comparable or even superior results compared to those of dermatologists. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the classification of melanoma by adopting different deep learning techniques applied to a common dataset, composed of images from the ISIC dataset and consisting of different types of skin diseases, including melanoma on which we applied a specific pre-processing phase. In particular, a comparison of the results is performed in order to select the best effective neural network to be applied to the problem of recognition and classification of melanoma. Moreover, we also evaluate the impact of the pre- processing phase on the final classification. Different metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity have been selected to assess the goodness of the adopted neural networks and compare them also with the manual classification of dermatologists.

Estimating the actual head orientation from 2D images, with regard to its three degrees of freedom, is a well known problem that is highly significant for a large number of applications involving head pose knowledge. Consequently, this topic has been tackled by a plethora of methods and algorithms the most part of which exploits neural networks. Machine learning methods, indeed, achieve accurate head rotation values yet require an adequate training stage and, to that aim, a relevant number of positive and negative examples. In this paper we take a different approach to this topic by using fractal coding theory and particularly Partitioned Iterated Function Systems to extract the fractal code from the input head image and to compare this representation to the fractal code of a reference model through Hamming distance. According to experiments conducted on both the BIWI and the AFLW2000 databases, the proposed PIFS based head pose estimation method provides accurate yaw/pitch/roll angular values, with a performance approaching that of state of the art of machine-learning based algorithms and exceeding most of non-training based approaches.