Diabetes is a chronic disease caused due to the increase in the sugar level in the blood. Diabetes mainly affects heart, blood vessels, kidneys, eyes and nerves. There are mellitus type 1 and 2 diabetes, in which insulin is either not taken by the body or not created by the body. As per the statistics provided by WHO, about 422 million people worldwide are fighting with diabetes. Primary source of vision loss in the patients suffering from diabetes is diabetic retinopathy where the individual suffers from the damage and growth of abnormal blood veins in the retina. The disease is observed by ophthalmologist through identifying the presence of abnormalities starting from microaneurysms in the non-proliferative stage of DR and if these lesions' presence is ignored and not detected then it leads to the neovascularization in the proliferative stage which leads to unavoidable vision loss. DR can be cured if detected at the beginning stage. Manual method takes lots of time for detection of DR hence it is important to develop computer-based diagnostic system for DR detection using artificial intelligence (AI) and advance image processing to help ophthalmologists for spotting early symptoms of DR in less time. This paper provides a descriptive study about recent trends and technologies used for automatic spotting and grading of DR.