Automated image quality evaluation of retinal fundus photographs in diabetic retinopathy screening

Abstract

This paper presents a system that can automatically determine whether the quality of a retinal image is sufficient for computer-based diabetic retinopathy (DR) screening. The system integrates global histogram features, textural features, and vessel density, as well as a local non-reference perceptual sharpness metric. A partial least square (PLS) classifier is trained to distinguish low quality images from normal quality images. The system was evaluated on a large, representative set of 1884 non-mydriatic retinal images from 412 subjects. An area under the ROC curve of 96% was achieved.