Automated identification of cataract severity using retinal fundus images
Azhar Imran, Jianqiang Li, Yan Pei, Faheem Akhtar, Ji‐Jiang Yang, Yanping Dang
Abstract
Cataract is the most prevalent cause of blindness worldwide, which accounts for more than 51% of overall blindness. The early detection of cataract can salvage impaired vision leading to blindness. Most of the existing cataract classification systems are based on traditional machine learning methods with hand-engineered features. The manual extraction of retinal features is generally a time-taking process and requires professional ophthalmologists. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a widely accepted model for automatic feature extraction, but it necessitates a larger dataset to evade overfitting problems. Contrarily, classification using SVM has great generalisation power to elucidate small-sample dataset. Therefore, we proposed a hybrid model by integrating deep learning models and SVM for 4-class cataract classification. The transfer learning-based models (AlexNet, VGGNet, ResNet) are employed for automatic feature extraction and SVM performs as a recogniser. The proposed architecture evaluated on 8030 retinal images with strong feature extraction and classification techniques has achieved 95.65% of accuracy. The results of this study have verified that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods and can provide a reference for other retinal diseases.