A Novelty Approach to Retina Diagnosing Using Biometric Techniques With SVM and Clustering Algorithms

A method to extract the retina characteristic points for the purpose of medical diagnosis of the human eye is presented in this research. The proposed method helps to make the primary decision about the illness faster and can be used on mobile devices. The algorithm is mostly based on the characteristic points (the so-called minutiae). These structures are commonly used in the biometric applications for fingerprint-based people recognition. In the case of the conducted research, this trait was used to differentiate healthy eyes from unhealthy ones. The methods were evaluated by appropriately implemented algorithms, showing promising results. Each solution was created with object-oriented programming language. The accuracy of the classification (healthy versus samples with pathological changes) was evaluated using four algorithms: k-Nearest Neighbors, k-Means and Support Vector Machines (SVM) with linear and third-degree polynomial as well as our own approach based on counting the minutiae number. Performance requirements were also checked, and it was verified that the computing power of modern mobile devices is sufficient to implement the proposed solution. The highest accuracy result was equal to 96,45% and was obtained with the third-degree polynomial SVM. This was a novel approach. For comparative purposes, we also implemented currently used solutions for image analysis - deep learning (DL) and Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs). Both medical and computer science backgrounds are presented in the work with the main methodology components to include image segmentation using the Gaussian Matched Filter, binarization by Local Entropy Thresholding and classification with the previously mentioned approaches.