Fundus Lesion Detection Based on Visual Attention Model

Reliable detection of fundus lesion is important for automated screening of diabetic retinopathy. This paper presents a novel method to detect the fundus lesion in retinal fundus image based on a visual attention model. The proposed method intends to model the visual attention mechanism of ophthalmologists during observing fundus images. That is, the abnormal structures, such as the dark and bright lesions in the image, usually attract the most attention of experts, however, the normal structures, such as optic disc and vessels, have been usually selectively ignored. To measure the visual attention for abnormal and normal areas, the incremental coding length is computed in local and global manner respectively. The final saliency map of fundus lesion is a fusion of attention maps computed for the abnormal and normal areas. Experimental results conducted on the publicly DiaRetDB1 dataset show that the proposed method achieved a sensitivity of 0.71 at a specificity of 0.82 and an AUC of 0.76 for fundus lesion detection, and achieved an accuracy of 100% for normal area (optic disc) detection. The proposed method can assist the ophthalmologists in the inspection of fundus lesion.