Microaneurysms detection in retinal images using a multi-scale approach

Abstract

One of the earliest signs of diabetic retinopathy is the appearance of small and round red dots in retinal fundus images, known as microaneurysms. Microaneurysms automatic detection is a challenging task due to their small and subtle nature. In this paper, a new multi-scale algorithm developed for the automatic detection of microaneurysms in retinal fundus images is proposed. The proposed method is divided into three stages, namely, image pre-processing, microaneurysm candidates detection and retinal vessels detection, and labelling of the microaneurysm candidates. Apart the initial image pre-processing, all stages of the algorithm are designed using a multi-scale framework, providing the mechanism for the effective microaneurysms detection. Four publicly available databases are used for performance evaluation. The proposed method proves to be competitive against other state-of-the-art approaches in microaneurysms detection and diabetic retinopathy detection.