Detecting red-lesions from retinal fundus images using unique morphological features

Abstract

One of the most important retinal diseases is Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) which can lead to serious damage to vision if remains untreated. Red-lesions are from important demonstrations of DR helping its identification in early stages. The detection and verification of them is helpful in the evaluation of disease severity and progression. In this paper, a novel image processing method is proposed for extracting red-lesions from fundus images. The method works based on finding and extracting the unique morphological features of red-lesions. After quality improvement of images, a pixel-based verification is performed in the proposed method to find the ones which provide a significant intensity change in a curve-like neighborhood. In order to do so, a curve is considered around each pixel and the intensity changes around the curve boundary are considered. The pixels for which it is possible to find such curves in at least two directions are considered as parts of red-lesions. The simplicity of computations, the high accuracy of results, and no need to post-processing operations are the important characteristics of the proposed method endorsing its good performance.