ResNet-50 and ResNeXt-50 for Multiclass Classification of Chronic Wound Images under Gaussian Blur

Abstract

Chronic wound image classification is important for supporting the assessment of conditions such as diabetic foot ulcers (DFU) and pressure ulcers (PU). While convolutional neural network (CNN)--based approaches have shown promising results, most previous studies focus on binary classification and rarely evaluate robustness in multiclass chronic wound scenarios. This study investigates multiclass classification of chronic wound images, distinguishing DFU, PU, and Normal Skin, using ResNet-50 and ResNeXt-50 architectures. A total of 2,146 publicly available images were stratified at the image level into training (70%), validation (15%), and test (15%) sets. Both models were trained under an identical configuration using data augmentation and class-weighted loss. On clean test images, ResNet-50 and ResNeXt-50 achieved strong and comparable performance, with accuracies of 0.9877 and 0.9938 and macro-averaged F1-scores of 0.9866 and 0.9928, respectively. Robustness was evaluated by applying Gaussian blur at the inference stage to simulate image defocus. Under stronger blur ((σ = 2.0), ResNeXt-50 maintained higher performance (accuracy 0.9723, macro-F1 0.9679) than ResNet-50 (accuracy 0.9200, macro-F1 0.9123). These results highlight the contribution of this study in evaluating robustness to blur in multiclass chronic wound image classification, while emphasizing that robustness is limited to resistance against image blur or defocus.