Locally Adaptive Operators for Red Lesions Detection in Eye Fundus Images

One of the major features required by automated software tools of screening for diabetic retinopathy is the detection of red lesions. This paper presents a new automatic method in order to locate red lesions in color eye fundus images. The method relies on mathematical morphology operators and has a coarse and a fine detection stages, respectively. The former detection stage detects structures of low-intensity values in the retina, such as microaneurysms, hemorrhages, blood vessels and the fovea center. Additionally, the latter stage proposes to improve the detection of red lesions identified in the previous stage. For experiments, we use the well-known publicly available DIARETDB1 database. The results indicate that our method detected red lesions with 75.81% and 93.48% of mean sensitivity and mean specificity, respectively.