Ensemble-based exudate detection in color fundus images

Diabetic retinopathy causes blindness to millions in the world. Exudates are early lesions of this disease so the automatic detection is very important to slow down the progression of retinopathy. In this paper, an ensemble-based system is proposed to improve the detection. Optimal combination of preprocessing methods and exudate candidate extractors are found and organized into a voting system for this aim. Our results show that in this way we outperform the individual exudate detector algorithms.