AbstractSkin cancer is the most prevalent kind of cancer in people. It is estimated that more than 1 million people get skin cancer every year in the world. The effectiveness of the disease’s therapy is significantly impacted by early identification of this illness. Preprocessing is the initial detecting stage in enhancing the quality of skin images by removing undesired background noise and objects. This study aims is to compile preprocessing techniques for skin cancer imaging that are currently accessible. Researchers looking into automated skin cancer diagnosis might use this article as an excellent place to start. The fully convolutional encoder–decoder network and Sparrow search algorithm (FCEDN-SpaSA) are proposed in this study for the segmentation of dermoscopic images. The individual wolf method and the ensemble ghosting technique are integrated to generate a neighbour-based search strategy in SpaSA for stressing the correct balance between navigation and exploitation. The classification procedure is accomplished by using an adaptive CNN technique to discriminate between normal skin and malignant skin lesions suggestive of disease. Our method provides classification accuracies comparable to commonly used incremental learning techniques while using less energy, storage space, memory access, and training time (only network updates with new training samples, no network sharing). In a simulation, the segmentation performance of the proposed technique on the ISBI 2017, ISIC 2018, and PH2 datasets reached accuracies of 95.28%, 95.89%, 92.70%, and 98.78%, respectively, on the same dataset and assessed the classification performance. It is accurate 91.67% of the time. The efficiency of the suggested strategy is demonstrated through comparisons with cutting-edge methodologies.