ABSTRACT
Most challenging yet, the need of the hour is accurate diagnosis of COVID-19, as the Coronavirus cases are increasing drastically day-by-day. Ceaseless efforts by the researchers and innovators have led to the development of several diagnostic models based on Deep Learning for effective diagnosis of COVID-19. However, the Deep Learning techniques that have been developed so far, fail to address major challenges such as overfitting, stability, computation overhead due to the usage of the massive volume of parameters and problems associated with the multi-class classification. Also in the medical perspective, researchers often suffer to identify the infinitesimal difference that exists in the radiographic images among the several lung diseases which makes the decision-making process difficult. Thus, to curb the crisis and to provide promising solutions & expertise for accurate diagnosis, this paper presents a novel lightweight multi-class multi-label COVID-19 detection model to assist physicians with greater ease to fight against this pandemic situation. Radiographic images are pre-processed using Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and classified using novel Stacked Dark COVID-Net. The proposed model is validated using chest X-ray images and the results confirm the efficacy of the proposed model in terms of classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and stability. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.