Detecting changes is an important issue for ophthalmology to compare longitudinal fundus images at different stages and obtain change regions. Illumination variations bring distractions on the change regions by the pixel-by-pixel comparison. In this paper, a new unsupervised change detection method based on sparse representation classification (SRC) is proposed for the fundus image pair. First, the local neighborhood patches are extracted from the reference image to build a dictionary of the local background. Then the current image patch is represented sparsely and its background is reconstructed by the obtained dictionary. Finally, change regions are given through background subtracting. The SRC method can correct automatically illumination variations through the representation coefficients and filter local contrast and global intensity effectively. In experiments of this paper, the AUC and mAP values of SRC method are 0.9858 and 0.8647 respectively for the image pair with small lesions; the AUC and mAP values of the fusion method of IRHSF and SRC are 0.9892 and 0.9692 separately for the image pair with the big change region. Experiments show that the proposed method in this paper is more robust than RPCA for the illumination variations and can detect change regions more effectively than pixel-wised image differencing.

Change detection on retinal fundus image pairs mainly seeks to compare the important differences between a pair of images obtained at two different time points such as in anatomical structures or lesions. Illumination variation usually challenges the change detection methods in many cases. Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) takes intensity normalization and linear interpolation to greatly reduce the illumination variation between the continuous frames and then decomposes the image matrix to obtain the robust background model. The matrix-RPCA can obtain clear change regions, but when there are local bright spots on the image, the background model is vulnerable to illumination, and the change detection results are inaccurate. In this paper, a patch-based RPCA (P-RPCA) is proposed to detect the change of fundus image pairs, where a pair of fundus images is normalized and linearly interpolated to expand a low-rank image sequence; then, images are divided into many patches to obtain an image-patch matrix, and finally, the change regions are obtained by the low-rank decomposition. The proposed method is validated on a set of large lesion image pairs in clinical data. The area under curve (AUC) and mean average precision (mAP) of the method proposed in this paper are 0.9832 and 0.8641, respectively. For a group of small lesion image pairs with obvious local illumination changes in clinical data, the AUC and mAP obtained by the P-RPCA method are 0.9893 and 0.9401, respectively. The results show that the P-RPCA method is more robust to local illumination changes than the RPCA method, and has stronger performance in change detection than the RPCA method.