Diabetic retinopathy detection and classification using hybrid feature set

Abstract

Complicated stages of diabetes are the major cause of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) and no symptoms appear at the initial stage of DR. At the early stage diagnosis of DR, screening and treatment may reduce vision harm. In this work, an automated technique is applied for detection and classification of DR. A local contrast enhancement method is used on grayscale images to enhance the region of interest. An adaptive threshold method with mathematical morphology is used for the accurate lesions region segmentation. After that, the geometrical and statistical features are fused for better classification. The proposed method is validated on DIARETDB1, E-ophtha, Messidor, and local data sets with different metrics such as area under the curve (AUC) and accuracy (ACC).

Keywords: adaptive threshold; hybrid feature set; local contrast enhancement; mathematical morphology; retinal lesions.