Classification of non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy based on hard exudates using soft margin SVM

Diabetic retinopathy is a retinal disease caused by diabetes mellitus. Severity of diabetic retinopathy may lead to blindness. Therefore, early detection of diabetic retinopathy is very important. One of diabetic retinopathy symptoms is the existence of hard exudates. In this study, hard exudates in retinal fundus images are employed to classify the moderate and severe non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy. The hard exudates are segmented using mathematical morphology and the extracted features are classified by using soft margin SVM. The classification model achieves accuracy of 90.54% for 75 training data and 74 testing data of retinal images.