Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a complication of diabetes, which if untreated leads to blindness. DR early diagnosis and treatment improve outcomes. Automated assessment of single lesions associated with DR has been investigated for sometime. To improve on classification, especially across different ethnic groups, we present an approach using points-of-interest and visual dictionary that contains important features required to identify retinal pathology. Variation in images of the human retina with respect to differences in pigmentation and presence of diverse lesions can be analyzed without the necessity of preprocessing and utilizing different training sets to account for ethnic differences for instance. © 2011 IEEE. 59515954Mitchell, P., Foran, S., Wong, T.Y., Chua, B., Patel, I., Ojaimi, E., (2008) Guidelines for the Management of Diabetic Retinopathy, , Canberra: NHMRCJelinek, H.F., Cornforth, D., Cree, M., Cesar R M, J., Leandro, J.J.G., Soares, J.V.B., Mitchell, P., Automated characterisation of diabetic retinopathy using mathematical morphology: A pilot study for community health (2003) NSW Primary Health Care Research and Evaluation Conference, p. 48. , SydneyCree, M.J., Olson, J.A., McHardy, K., Sharp, P., Forrester, J., A fully automated comparative microaneurysm digital detection system (1997) Eye, 11, pp. 622-628Karperien, A.L., Jelinek, H.F., Leandro, J.J.G., Soares, J.V.B., Cesar R M, J., Luckie, A., Automated detection of proliferative retinopathy in clinical practice (2008) Clinical Ophthalmology, 2, pp. 109-122Wang, H., Hsu, W., Goh, K.G., Lee, M.L., An effective approach to detect lesions in colour retinal images (2000) IEEE Int. Conf. in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 181-187Streeter, L., Cree, M.J., Microaneurysm detection in colour fundus images (2003) Image and Vision Computing, pp. 280-284Goatman, K.A., Cree, M.J., Olson, J.A., Sharp, P.F., Forrester, J.V., Automated measurement of microaneurysm turnover (2003) Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, 44, pp. 5335-5341Cree, M.J., Gamble, E., Cornforth, D.J., Colour normalisation to reduce inter-patient and intra-patient variability in microaneurysm detection in colour retinal images (2005) Workshop on Digital Image Computing, pp. 163-169. , Brisbane, AustraliaValle, E., Cord, M., Philipp-Foliguet, S., High-dimensional descriptor indexing for large multimedia databases (2008) ACM Intl. Conf. on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 739-748Bay, H., Tuytelaars, T., Gool, L.V., SURF: Speeded up robust features (2006) European Conf. on Computer Vision, pp. 1-14Viola, P., Jones, M., Robust real-time face detection (2004) Intl. Journa of Computer Vision, 52, pp. 137-154Rocha, A., Carvalho, T., Goldenstein, S., Wainer, J., (2011) Points of Interest and Visual Dictionary for Retina Pathology Detection, , Technical Report IC-11-07, Institute of Computing, Univ. of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil