A fully automated approach is presented for robust detection and classification of changes in longitudinal time-series of color retinal fundus images of diabetic retinopathy. The method is robust to: 1) spatial variations in illumination resulting from instrument limitations and changes both within, and between patient visits; 2) imaging artifacts such as dust particles; 3) outliers in the training data; 4) segmentation and alignment errors. Robustness
to illumination variation is achieved by a novel iterative algorithm to estimate the reflectance of the retina exploiting automatically extracted segmentations of the retinal vasculature, optic disk, fovea, and pathologies. Robustness to dust artifacts is achieved by exploiting their spectral characteristics, enabling application to film-based, as well as digital imaging systems. False changes from alignment errors are minimized by subpixel accuracy registration using a 12-parameter transformation that accounts for unknown
retinal curvature and camer