Diptoneel Kayal and Sreeparna Banerjee, West Bengal University of Technology, India

Diabetic retinopathy is a disease commonly found in case of diabetes mellitus patients. It causes severe damage to retina and may lead to complete or partial visual loss. In case of diabetic retinopathy retinal blood vessel gets damaged and protein and fat based particles gets leaked out of the damaged blood vessels and are deposited in the intra-retinal space. They are normally seen as whitish marks of various shape and are called as exudates. Exudates are primary indication of diabetic retinopathy. As changes occurs due to the disease is irreversible in nature, the disease must be detected in early stages to prevent visual loss. But detection of exudates in early stages of the disease is extremely difficult only by visual inspection because of small diameter of human eye. But an efficient automated computerized system can have the ability to detect the disease in very early stage. In this paper we have proposed one such method.

Diabetic retinopathy, exudates, median filtering, thresholding, simulated annealing.