A successive clutter-rejection-based approach for early detection of diabetic retinopathy

The presence of microaneurysms (MAs) is usually an early sign of diabetic retinopathy and their automatic detection from color retinal images is of clinical interest. In this paper, we present a new approach for automatic MA detection from digital color fundus images. We formulate MA detection as a problem of target detection from clutter, where the probability of occurrence of target is considerably smaller compared to the clutter. A successive rejection-based strategy is proposed to progressively lower the number of clutter responses. The processing stages are designed to reject specific classes of clutter while passing majority of true MAs, using a set of specialized features. The true positives that remain after the final rejector are assigned a score which is based on its similarity to a true MA. Results of extensive evaluation of the proposed approach on three different retinal image datasets are reported, and used to highlight the promise in the presented strategy.