COVID-19 Identification Using Deep Capsule Network: A Perspective of Super-Resolution CNN on Low-Quality CXR Images

Chest X-ray has become a useful method in the detection of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). Due to the extreme global COVID-19 crisis, using the computerized diagnosis method for COVID-19 classification upon CXR images could significantly decrease clinician workload. We explicitly addressed the issue of low CXR image resolution by using Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (SRCNN) to effectively reconstruct high-resolution (HR) CXR images from low-resolution (LR) CXR correspondents. Then, the HRCXR images are fed into the modified capsule network to retrieve distinct features for the classification of COVID-19. We demonstrate the proposed model on a public dataset and achieve ACC of 97.3%, SEN of 97.8%, SPE of 96.9%, and AUC of 98.0%. This new conceptual framework is proposed to play a vital task in the issue facing COVID-19 and related ailments.