Retinal image enhancement based on color dominance of image

Abstract

Objective – Real-time fundus images captured to detect multiple diseases are prone to different quality issues like illumination, noise, etc., resulting in less visibility of anomalies. So, enhancing the retinal fundus images is essential for a better prediction rate of eye diseases. Method - In this paper, we propose Lab color space-based enhancement techniques for retinal image enhancement. Existing research works don’t consider the relation between color spaces of the fundus image in selecting a specific channel to perform retinal image enhancement. Our unique contribution to this research work is utilizing the color dominance of an image in quantifying the distribution of information in the blue channel and performing enhancement in Lab space followed by a series of steps to optimize overall brightness and contrast. Results - The test set of the Retinal Fundus Multi-disease Image Dataset is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed enhancement technique in identifying the presence or absence of retinal abnormality. The proposed technique achieved an accuracy of 89.53 percent.