Recently, automatic diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (DR) from the retinal image is the most significant research topic in the medical applications. Diabetic macular edema (DME) is the major reason for the loss of vision in patients suffering from DR. Early identification of the DR enables to prevent the vision loss and encourage diabetic control activities. Many techniques are developed to diagnose the DR. The major drawbacks of the existing techniques are low accuracy and high time complexity. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes an enhanced particle swarm optimization-differential evolution feature selection (PSO-DEFS) based feature selection approach with biometric authentication for the identification of DR. Initially, a hybrid median filter (HMF) is used for pre-processing the input images. Then, the pre-processed images are embedded with each other by using least significant bit (LSB) for authentication purpose. Simultaneously, the image features are extracted using convoluted local tetra pattern (CLTrP) and Tamura features. Feature selection is performed using PSO-DEFS and PSO-gravitational search algorithm (PSO-GSA) to reduce time complexity. Based on some performance metrics, the PSODEFS is chosen as a better choice for feature selection. The feature selection is performed based on the fitness value. A multi-relevance vector machine (M-RVM) is introduced to classify the 13 normal and 62 abnormal images among 75 images from 60 patients. Finally, the DR patients are further classified by M-RVM. The experimental results exhibit that the proposed approach achieves better accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity than the existing techniques.