Hard Exudates Detection Method Based on Background-Estimation

Hard exudates (HEs) are one kind of the most important symptoms of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). A new method based on background-estimation for hard exudates detection is presented. Firstly, through background-estimation, foreground map containing all bright objects is acquired. We use the edge information based on Kirsch operator to obtain HE candidates, and then we remove the optic disc. Finally, the shape features, histogram statistic features and phase features of the HE candidates are extracted. We use the SVM classifier to acquire the accurate extraction of HEs. The proposed method has been demonstrated on the public databases of DIARETDB1 and HEI-MED. The experiment results show that the method’s sensitivity is 97.3 % and the specificity is 90 % at the image level, and the mean sensitivity is 84.6 % and the mean predictive value is 94.4 % at the lesion level.