Transfer-Ensemble Learning based Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Diabetic Retinopathy Classification

Abstract: This article aims to classify diabetic retinopathy (DR) disease into five different classes using an ensemble approach based on two popular pre-trained convolutional neural networks: VGG16 and Inception V3. The proposed model aims to leverage the strengths of the two individual nets to enhance the classification performance for diabetic retinopathy. The ensemble model architecture involves freezing a portion of the layers in each pre-trained model to utilize their learned representations effectively. Global average pooling layers are added to transform the output feature maps into fixed-length vectors. These vectors are then concatenated to form a consolidated representation of the input image. The ensemble model is trained using a dataset of diabetic retinopathy images (APTOS), divided into training and validation sets. During the training process, the model learns to classify the retinal images into the corresponding diabetic retinopathy classes. Experimental results on the test set demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed ensemble model for DR classification achieving an accuracy of 96.4%.