Abstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) arises from blood vessel damage and is a leading cause of blindness on a global scale. Clinical professionals rely on examining fundus images to diagnose the disease, but this process is frequently prone to errors and is tedious. The usage of computer-assisted techniques offers assistance to clinicians in detecting the severity levels of the disease. Experiments involving automated diagnosis employing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have produced impressive outcomes in medical imaging. At the same time, retinal image grading for detecting DR severity levels has predominantly focused on spatial features. More spectral features must be explored for a more efficient performance of this task. Analysing spectral features plays a vital role in various tasks, including identifying specific objects or materials, anomaly detection, and differentiation between different classes or categories within an image. In this context, a model incorporating Wavelet CNN and Support Vector Machine has been introduced and assessed to classify clinically significant grades of DR from retinal fundus images. The experiments were conducted on the EyePACS dataset and the performance of the proposed model was evaluated on the following metrics: precision, recall, F1-score, accuracy, and AUC score. The results obtained demonstrate better performance compared to other state-of-the-art techniques.