A Comparison of Handcrafted and Deep Neural Network Feature Extraction for Classifying Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) Images

Optical Coherence Tomography allows ophthalmologist to obtain cross-section imaging of eye retina. Assisted with digital image analysis methods, effective disease detection could be performed. Various methods exist to extract feature from OCT images. The proposed study aims to compare the effectiveness of handcrafted and deep neural network features. The dataset consists of 32339 instances which are distributed in four classes. The feature extractors are Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG), Local Binary Pattern (LBP), DenseNet-169, and ResNet50. As a result, the deep neural network based methods outperformed the handcrafted feature with 88% and 89% accuracy for DenseNet and ResNet compared to 50 % and 42 % for HOG and LBP respectively. The deep neural network based methods also demonstrated better result on the under represented classes.