A deeply supervised maximum response texton based SegNet for simultaneous multi retinal lesion segmentation

Abstract Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a diabetic mellitus complication that causes vision impairment and may lead to permanent blindness. The early signs of DR that appear on the retinal surface are microaneurysms, hemorrhages, hard exudates, and soft exudates. Hence the automatic detection of these retinal lesions assists in the early diagnosis of DR. This paper presents a novel deep learning model, MRT‐SegNet (Maximum Response Texton – Segmentation Network) for the automatic segmentation of different retinal lesions simultaneously along with the optic disc. In the proposed MRT‐SegNet, each encoder block consists of an MRT filter bank that extracts the textural feature maps of the retinal images and then fuses them with the local feature maps that are extracted from the traditional encoder block of the network. This fusion enables the network to segment the minute lesions from the retinal surface. The proposed model is evaluated on the IDRiD dataset and achieves a mean Area Under the Precision & Recall Curve (mAUC_PR) of 0.698 and AUC_PR scores of 0.495, 0.706, 0.823, 0.769 for microaneurysms, hemorrhages, hard exudates, and soft exudates respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the MRT‐SegNet outperformed other multi retinal lesion segmentation models by achieving superior performance.