An Improved Model for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection by using Transfer
  Learning and Ensemble Learning
Md. Simul Hasan Talukder Ajay Kirshno Sarkar Sharmin Akter Md. Nuhi-Alamin
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is an ocular condition caused by a sustained high
level of sugar in the blood, which causes the retinal capillaries to block and
bleed, causing retinal tissue damage. It usually results in blindness. Early
detection can help in lowering the risk of DR and its severity. The robust and
accurate prediction and detection of diabetic retinopathy is a challenging
task. This paper develops a machine learning model for detecting Diabetic
Retinopathy that is entirely accurate. Pre-trained models such as ResNet50,
InceptionV3, Xception, DenseNet121, VGG19, NASNetMobile, MobileNetV2,
DensNet169, and DenseNet201 with pooling layer, dense layer, and appropriate
dropout layer at the bottom of them were carried out in transfer learning (TL)
approach. Data augmentation and regularization was performed to reduce
overfitting. Transfer Learning model of DenseNet121, Average and weighted
ensemble of DenseNet169 and DenseNet201 TL architectures contribute
individually the highest accuracy of 100%, the highest precision, recall, F-1
score of 100%, 100%, and 100%, respectively.