Microaneurysms detection in retinal images using a multi-scale approach

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.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a new multi-scale algorithm for the automatic detection of microaneurysms in retinal fundus images. The method consists of three stages and achieves competitive results in microaneurysms detection and diabetic retinopathy detection.