A coarse-to-fine strategy for automatically detecting exudates in color eye fundus images

The detection of exudates is a prerequisite for detecting and grading severe retinal lesions, like the diabetic macular edema. In this work, we present a new method based on mathematical morphology for detecting exudates in color eye fundus images. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed method performance on a known public database, namely DIARETDB1, indicates that it can achieve an average sensitivity of 70.48%, and an average specificity of 98.84%. Comparing to other recent automatic methods available in the literature, our proposed approach potentially can obtain better exudate detection results in terms of sensitivity and specificity. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.