Exudates dynamic detection in retinal fundus images based on the noise map distribution

Author

Soares, Ivo ; Castelo-Branco, Miguel ; Pinheiro, Antonio M. G.

Author_Institution

CICS - Centro de Inv. em Cienc. da Saude, Univ. da Beira Interior, Covilha, Portugal

fYear

2011

fDate

Aug. 29 2011-Sept. 2 2011

Firstpage

46

Lastpage

50

Abstract

In this paper a new and reliable method to detect and segment the exudates in retinal fundus images is presented. The introduced approach is based in the computation of the noise map distribution, and on the use of morphological operators and adaptive thresholding. The proposed method reveals a good resilience to contrast changes, non-uniform illumination and variable background, resulting in a correct detection of exudates. A sensitivity of 97.49%, a specificity of 99.95% and an Accuracy of 99.91% is achieved for the exudates detection. Moreover, the method is very effective when applied in the segmentation of the exudates. A comparison is made with recent works. The application of the method shows a strong potential that can be applied in automatic detection and follow-up studies in diabetic retinopathy.

Keywords

biomedical optical imaging; diseases; eye; image denoising; image segmentation; medical image processing; vision defects; adaptive thresholding; automatic detection; diabetic retinopathy; exudate dynamic detection; exudate segmentation; morphological operators; noise map distribution; nonuniform illumination; retinal fundus imaging; Accuracy; Biomedical imaging; Image segmentation; Lesions; Lighting; Noise; Retina; Adaptive threshold; Exudates; Feature detection; Noise map distribution;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Signal Processing Conference, 2011 19th European

Conference_Location

Barcelona

ISSN

2076-1465

Type

conf

Filename

7074268