CURVELET FUSION ENHACEMENT BASED EVALUATION OF DIABETIC RETINOPATHY BY THE IDENTIFICATION OF EXUDATES IN OPTIC COLOR FUNDUS IMAGES

Rapid growth of Diabetes mellitus in people causes damage to posterior part of eye vessel structures. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is an important hurdle in diabetic people and it causes lesion formation in retina due to retinal vessel structures damage. Bright lesions (BLs) or exudates are initial clinical signs of DR. Early BLs detection can help avoiding vision loss. The severity can be recognized based on number of BLs formed in the color fundus image. Manually diagnosing a large amount of images is time consuming. So a computerized DR grading and BLs detection system is proposed. In this paper for BLs detection, curvelet fusion enhancement is done initially because bright objects maps to largest coeffcients in an image by utilizing the curvelet transform, so that BLs can be recognized in the retina easily. Then optic disk (OD) appearance is similar to BLs and vessel structures are barriers for lesion exact detection and moreover OD falsely classified as BLs and that increases false positives in classification. So these structures are segmented and eliminated by thresholding techniques. Various features were obtained from detected BLs. Publicly available databases are used for DR severity testing. 260 fundus images were used for the performance evaluation of proposed work. The support vector machine classifier (SVM) used to separate fundus images in various levels of DR based on feature set extracted. The proposed system that obtained the statistical measures were sensitivity 100%, specificity 95.4% and accuracy 97.74%. Compared to existing state-of-art techniques, the proposed work obtained better results in terms of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy.