Early detection of eye diseases is the only solution to receive timely treatment and prevent blindness. Colour fundus photography (CFP) is an effective fundus examination technique. Because of the similarity in the symptoms of eye diseases in the early stages and the difficulty in distinguishing between the type of disease, there is a need for computer-assisted automated diagnostic techniques. This study focuses on classifying an eye disease dataset using hybrid techniques based on feature extraction with fusion methods. Three strategies were designed to classify CFP images for the diagnosis of eye disease. The first method is to classify an eye disease dataset using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with features from the MobileNet and DenseNet121 models separately after reducing the high dimensionality and repetitive features using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The second method is to classify the eye disease dataset using an ANN on the basis of fused features from the MobileNet and DenseNet121 models before and after reducing features. The third method is to classify the eye disease dataset using ANN based on the fused features from the MobileNet and DenseNet121 models separately with handcrafted features. Based on the fused MobileNet and handcrafted features, the ANN attained an AUC of 99.23%, an accuracy of 98.5%, a precision of 98.45%, a specificity of 99.4%, and a sensitivity of 98.75%.
Keywords: ANN; DenseNet-121; MobileNet; PCA; eye diseases; handcrafted features.