Features extraction using encoded local binary pattern for detection and grading diabetic retinopathy

Introduction Reliable computer diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (DR) is needed to rescue many with diabetes who may be under threat of blindness. This research aims to detect the presence of diabetic retinopathy in fundus images and grade the disease severity without lesion segmentation. Methods To ensure that the fundus images are in a standard state of brightness, a series of preprocessing steps have been applied to the green channel image using histogram matching and a median filter. Then, contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalisation is performed, followed by the unsharp filter. The preprocessed image is divided into small blocks, and then each block is processed to extract uniform local binary patterns (LBPs) features. The extracted features are encoded, and the feature size is reduced to 3.5 percent of its original size. Classifiers like Support Vector Machine (SVM) and a proposed CNN model were used to classify retinal fundus images. The classification is abnormal or normal and to grade the severity of DR. Results Our feature extraction method was tested on a binary classifier and resulted in an accuracy of 98.37% and 98.84% on the Messidor2 and EyePACS databases, respectively. The proposed system could grade DR severity into three grades (0: no DR, 1: mild DR, and 5: moderate, severe NPDR, and PDR). It obtains an F1-score of 0.9617 and an accuracy of 95.37% on the EyePACS database, and an F1-score of 0.9860 and an accuracy of 97.57% on the Messidor2 database. The resultant values are dependent on the selection of (neighbours, radius) pairs during the extraction of LBP features. Conclusions This study's results proved that the preprocessing steps are significant and had a great effect on highlighting image features. The novel method of stacking and encoding the LBP values in the feature vector greatly affects results when using SVM or CNN for classification. The proposed system outperforms the state of the artwork. The proposed CNN model performs better than SVM.