Diabetic Retinopathy is a global health problem, influences 100 million individuals worldwide, and in the next few decades, these incidences are expected to reach epidemic proportions. Diabetic Retinopathy is a subtle eye disease that can cause sudden, irreversible vision loss. The early-stage Diabetic Retinopathy diagnosis can be challenging for human experts, considering the visual complexity of fundus photography retinal images. However, Early Stage detection of Diabetic Retinopathy can significantly alter the severe vision loss problem. The competence of computer-aided detection systems to accurately detect the Diabetic Retinopathy had popularized them among researchers. In this study, we have utilized a pre-trained DenseNet121 network with several modifications and trained on APTOS 2019 dataset. The proposed method outperformed other state-of-the-art networks in early-stage detection and achieved 96.51% accuracy in severity grading of Diabetic Retinopathy for multi-label classification and achieved 94.44% accuracy for single-class classification method. Moreover, the precision, recall, f1-score, and quadratic weighted kappa for our network was reported as 86%, 87%, 86%, and 91.96%, respectively. Our proposed architecture is simultaneously very simple, accurate, and efficient concerning computational time and space.
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