A coarse-to-fine strategy for automatically detecting exudates in color eye fundus images

Abstract 

The detection of exudates is a prerequisite for detecting and grading severe retinal lesions, like the diabetic macular edema. In this work, we present a new method based on mathematical morphology for detecting exudates in color eye fundus images. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed method performance on a known public database, namely DIARETDB1, indicates that it can achieve an average sensitivity of 70.48%, and an average specificity of 98.84%. Comparing to other recent automatic methods available in the literature, our proposed approach potentially can obtain better exudate detection results in terms of sensitivity and specificity.

Keywords: Eye fundus image analysis, Exudate detection, Mathematical morphology, Color image analysis, Diabetic macular edema