Abstract
Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a technique highly capable of modelling the structure of an observation sequence. In this paper, HMM is used to provide the contextual information for detecting clinical signs present in diabetic retinopathy screen images. However, there is a need to determine a feature set that best represents the complexity of the data as well as determine an optimal HMM. This paper addresses these problems by automatically selecting the best feature set while evolving the structure and obtaining the parameters of a Hidden Markov Model. This novel algorithm not only selects the best feature set, but also identifies the topology of the HMM, the optimal number of states, as well as the initial transition probabilities. © 2012 IEEE.