Automatic detection of microaneurysms in color fundus images

Abstract

This paper addresses the automatic detection of microaneurysms in color fundus images, which plays a key role in computer assisted diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy, a serious and frequent eye disease. The algorithm can be divided into four steps. The first step consists in image enhancement, shade correction and image normalization of the green channel. The second step aims at detecting candidates, i.e. all patterns possibly corresponding to MA, which is achieved by diameter closing and an automatic threshold scheme. Then, features are extracted, which are used in the last step to automatically classify candidates into real MA and other objects; the classification relies on kernel density estimation with variable bandwidth. A database of 21 annotated images has been used to train the algorithm. The algorithm was compared to manually obtained gradings of 94 images; sensitivity was 88.5% at an average number of 2.13 false positives per image.