A Novel Microaneurysms Detection Method Based on Local Applying of Markov Random Field.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the most common complications of long-term diabetes. It is a progressive disease and by damaging retina, it finally results in blindness of patients. Since Microaneurysms (MAs) appear as a first sign of DR in retina, early detection of this lesion is an essential step in automatic detection of DR. In this paper, a new MAs detection method is presented. The proposed approach consists of two main steps. In the first step, the MA candidates are detected based on local applying of Markov random field model (MRF). In the second step, these candidate regions are categorized to identify the correct MAs using 23 features based on shape, intensity and Gaussian distribution of MAs intensity. The proposed method is evaluated on DIARETDB1 which is a standard and publicly available database in this field. Evaluation of the proposed method on this database resulted in the average sensitivity of 0.82 for a confidence level of 75 as a ground truth. The results show that our method is able to detect the low contrast MAs with the background while its performance is still comparable to other state of the art approaches.