EYE-YOLO: a multi-spatial pyramid pooling and Focal-EIOU loss inspired tiny YOLOv7 for fundus eye disease detection

Purpose The purpose of this work is to present an approach for autonomous detection of eye disease in fundus images. Furthermore, this work presents an improved variant of the Tiny YOLOv7 model developed specifically for eye disease detection. The model proposed in this work is a highly useful tool for the development of applications for autonomous detection of eye diseases in fundus images that can help and assist ophthalmologists. Design/methodology/approach The approach adopted to carry out this work is twofold. Firstly, a richly annotated dataset consisting of eye disease classes, namely, cataract, glaucoma, retinal disease and normal eye, was created. Secondly, an improved variant of the Tiny YOLOv7 model was developed and proposed as EYE-YOLO. The proposed EYE-YOLO model has been developed by integrating multi-spatial pyramid pooling in the feature extraction network and Focal-EIOU loss in the detection network of the Tiny YOLOv7 model. Moreover, at run time, the mosaic augmentation strategy has been utilized with the proposed model to achieve benchmark results. Further, evaluations have been carried out for performance metrics, namely, precision, recall, F1 Score, average precision (AP) and mean average precision (mAP). Findings The proposed EYE-YOLO achieved 28% higher precision, 18% higher recall, 24% higher F1 Score and 30.81% higher mAP than the Tiny YOLOv7 model. Moreover, in terms of AP for each class of the employed dataset, it achieved 9.74% higher AP for cataract, 27.73% higher AP for glaucoma, 72.50% higher AP for retina disease and 13.26% higher AP for normal eye. In comparison to the state-of-the-art Tiny YOLOv5, Tiny YOLOv6 and Tiny YOLOv8 models, the proposed EYE-YOLO achieved 6–23.32% higher mAP. Originality/value This work addresses the problem of eye disease recognition as a bounding box regression and detection problem. Whereas, the work in the related research is largely based on eye disease classification. The other highlight of this work is to propose a richly annotated dataset for different eye diseases useful for training deep learning-based object detectors. The major highlight of this work lies in the proposal of an improved variant of the Tiny YOLOv7 model focusing on eye disease detection. The proposed modifications in the Tiny YOLOv7 aided the proposed model in achieving better results as compared to the state-of-the-art Tiny YOLOv8 and YOLOv8 Nano.