Abstract
The Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of medical services across the globe, especially in underdevel-oped nations. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak, a strong demand exists for developing novel computer-assisted diagnostic tools to execute rapid and cost-effective screenings in locations where many screenings cannot be executed using conventional methods. Medical imaging has become a crucial component in the disease diagnosis process, whereas X-rays and Computed Tomography (CT) scan imaging are employed in a deep network to diagnose the diseases. In general, four steps are followed in image-based diagnostics and disease classification processes by making use of the neural networks, such as network training, feature extraction, model performance testing and optimal feature selection. The current research article devises a Chaotic Flower Pollination Algorithm with a Deep Learning-Driven Fusion (CFPA-DLDF) approach for detecting and classifying COVID-19. The presented CFPA-DLDF model is developed by integrating two DL models to recognize COVID-19 in medical images. Initially, the proposed CFPA-DLDF technique employs the Gabor Filtering (GF) approach to pre-process the input images. In addition, a weighted voting-based ensemble model is employed for feature extraction, in which both VGG-19 and the MixNet models are included. Finally, the CFPA with Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model is utilized for classification, showing the work's novelty. A comparative analysis was conducted to demonstrate the enhanced performance of the proposed CFPA-DLDF model, and the results established the supremacy of the proposed CFPA-DLDF model over recent approaches.