Cancer detection is generally carried out manually by trained professionals and these techniques are majorly helpful in the advanced stage detection, also it involves a very tedious procedure and highly dependent on the given individual. This introduces the high possibility of human error in the detection process which necessitate an automated process. Hence, this paper aims at early detection of cancer through an automated process to minimize human error and making the process more accurate and hassle-free. In the proposed work, image processing algorithms and artificial neural network have been employed to design an automated process for early stage detection of lung cancer. © 2017 IEEE.