Glaucoma Detection in Retinal Fundus Images Based on Deep Transfer Learning and Fuzzy Aggregation Operators

The early diagnosis of the glaucoma disease in the eye is crucial to avoid vision loss. This paper proposes an efficient computer-aided detection (CAD) system for diagnosing glaucoma based on fundus images, deep transfer learning and fuzzy aggregation operators. Specifically, the proposed CAD system includes three stages: (1) Detection of the region of interest of the optic disc using an efficient deep learning network, (2) Classification of images based on different pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks and support vector machines, and (3) Use of fuzzy aggregation operators to fuse the predictions of glaucoma classifiers. We used three popular yet robust aggregators: ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator, weighted power mean (WPM), and exponential mean (EXM). We assessed the efficacy of the proposed glaucoma CAD system on three public datasets: DRISHTI-GS1, RIM-ONE, and REFUGE. The proposed conjunctive OWA aggregation method (Conj-OWA) achieves the best glaucoma classification results. Specifically, it achieves accuracy values of 90.2%, 97.8%, and 94.3% and area under the curve (AUC) values of 95.3%, 99.8%, and 96.2%, respectively, on DRISHTI-GS1, RIM-ONE, and REFUGE databases.