Secured Diabetic Retinopathy Detection through Hard Exudates

At least one person in every 20 people is a diabetic patient all over the world. Long term diabetes may cause diabetic retinopathy (DR), which leads to complete blindness except it is identified at the initial stage. Hard exudates are one of the most noticeable symptoms for DR. In this paper, an automated process to spot the presence of hard exudates in a retinal fundus image has been developed. This work will be helpful to ophthalmologists to detect DR in a rapid and reliable way even at the early stage. This proposed methodology is a generic process as it does not require any training dataset to recognize the exudates. The rudiments of digital image processing have been utilized here to locate the hard exudates. Telemedicine has become an indispensable thing after the expansion of COVID-19. Reliability on automated reports is very important to provide a proper service through telemedicine. A dual watermarking process has been employed over the automated test image by using an imperceptible and fragile mark to provide integrity, and a robust visible mark for content labeling. The efficiency of the whole process has been optimized in all possible aspects.