Detection of macular whitening and retinal hemorrhages for diagnosis of malarial retinopathy

Retinopathy deals with the abnormalities associated with human retina. Retinal whitening and hemorrhages are the most common lesions present in the image. Furthermore presence or retinal whitening in macular region contributes to vision loss. An automated system based on image processing an machine learning tools have been used for early detection of hemorrhages and whitening to prevent from other severe disease and vision loss. For the detection of retinal whitening, white regions are localized first than a set of features is extracted out of which most relevant are used for classification. The hemorrhages are detected by applying illumination equalization following with the segmentation of hemorrhages and vessels, the small false regions are removed to accurately detect hemorrhages. The proposed system achieves an average accuracy of 90% and 97.3% for retinal whitening and hemorrhages respectively.