Enhanced CAE system for detection of exudates and diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy stages in fundus retinal images using soft computing techniques

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of visual impairment. Diabetic Retinopathy is the most recent technique of identifying the intensity of acid secretion in the eye for diabetic patients. The identification of DR is performed by visual analysis of retinal images for exudates (fat deposits) and the main patterns are traced by ophthalmologists. This paper proposes a fully automated Computer Assisted Evaluation (CAE) system which comprises of a set of algorithms for exudates detection and to classify the different stages of Diabetics Retinopathy, which are identified as either normal or mild or moderate or severe. Experimental validation is performed on a real fundus retinal image database. The segmentation of exudates is achieved using fuzzy C-means clustering and entropy filtering. An optimal set obtained from the statistical textural features (GLCM and GLHM) is extracted from the segmented exudates for classifying the different stages of Diabetics Retinopathy. The different stages of Diabetic Retinopathy are classified using three classifiers such as Back Propagation Neural Network (BPN), Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The experimental results show that the SVM classifiers outperformed other classifiers for the examined fundus retinal image dataset. The results obtained confirm that with new a set of texture features, the proposed methodology provides better performance when compared to the other methods available in the literature. These results suggest that our proposed method in this paper can be useful as a diagnostic aid system for Diabetic Retinopathy.