Automatic Detection of Exudates in Retinal Images Using Neural Network

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the major complications of diabetes mellitus and can cause blindness. The diagnosis of DR is performed by visual analysis of retinal images, with exudates (fat deposits) being the main patterns traced by a specialist doctor. Thus, this paper proposes an algorithm for exudate detection in retinal images, whose experimental validation is performed on a public image database, DIARETDB1. The proposed methodology combines fuzzy clustering and classification. Furthermore, it provides a method for optic disc detection, considering that it is a convergence point of vessels. The obtained results confirm the performance improvement provided by the proposed methodology when comparing it to other methods available in the literature. Keywords— Artificial Neural Network, Digital Image Processing, Exudate Detection, Machine Learning