An Efficient Integrated Approach for the Detection of Exudates and Diabetic Maculopathy in Colour fundus Images

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of blindness. Exudates are one of the primary signs of diabetic retinopathy which is a main cause of blindness that could be prevented with an early screening process In this approach, the process and knowledge of digital image processing to diagnose exudates from images of retina is applied. An automated method to detect and localize the presence of exudates and Maculopathy from low-contrast digital images of Retinopathy patient’s with non-dilated pupils is proposed. First, the image is segmented using colour K-means Clustering algorithm. The segmented image along with Optic Disc (OD) is chosen. To Classify these segmented region, features based on colour and texture are extracted. The selected feature vector are then classified into exudates and nonexudates using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) Classifier. Also the detection of Diabetic Maculopathy, which is the severe stage of Diabetic Retinopathy is performed using Morphological Operation. Using a clinical reference standard, images with exudates were detected with 96% success rate. This method appears promising as it can detect the very small areas of exudates.