Detection of hard exudates using mean shift and normalized cut method

As diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the main causes of loss of vision among diabetic patients, an early detection using automated detection techniques can prevent blindness among diabetic patients. Hard exudates constitute one of the early symptoms of DR and this paper describes a method for its detection using fundus images of retina, employing a combination of morphological operations, mean shift (MS), normalized cut (NC) and Canny's operation. This combined technique avoids over segmentation and at the same time reduces the time complexity while clearly delineating the exudates. Output of the proposed method is evaluated using public databases and produces sensitivity, specificity and accuracy as 98.80%, 98.25% and 98.65%, respectively. The ROC curve gives 0.984 as area under curve. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and area under curve of ROC indicate the effectiveness of the method.