Retinal image quality classification using fine-tuned CNN

Abstract

Retinal image quality classification makes a great difference in automated diabetic retinopathy screening systems. With the increase of application of portable fundus cameras, we can get a large number of retinal images, but there are quite a number of images in poor quality because of uneven illumination, occlusion and patients movements. Using the dataset with poor quality training networks for DR screening system will lead to the decrease of accuracy. In this paper, we first explore four CNN architectures (AlexNet, GoogLeNet, VGG-16, and ResNet-50) from ImageNet image classification task to our Retinal fundus images quality classification, then we pick top two networks out and jointly fine-tune the two networks. The total loss of the network we proposed is equal to the sum of the losses of all channels. We demonstrate the super performance of our proposed algorithm on a large retinal fundus image dataset and achieve an optimal accuracy of 97.12%, outperforming the current methods in this area.