Automatic detection of the presence of bright lesions in color fundus photographs

A novel scheme for the detection of bright lesions in digital color photographs is presented. A supervised system is used to assign a soft label to each pixel in a retinal image indicating the probability that it is a bright lesion pixel. Then, through a classifier combination scheme, the probability that bright lesions are present anywhere in the image is obtained. To counter spurious responses on certain retinal landmarks such as the optic disc, prior knowledge about the location of the major anatomical landmarks on the retina is integrated into the system. Different system setups are compared. The best performing system obtains an area under the ROC curve of 0.88.