Automatic detection and segmentation of optic disc and fovea in retinal images

Feature extraction from retinal images is gaining popularity worldwide as many pathologies are proved having connections with these features. Automatic detection of these features makes it easier for the specialist ophthalmologists to analyse them without spending exhaustive time to segment them manually. The proposed method automatically detects the optic disc (OD) using histogram-based template matching combined with the maximum sum of vessel information in the retinal image. The OD region is segmented by using the circular Hough transform. For detecting fovea, the retinal image is uniformly divided into three horizontal strips and the strip including the detected OD is selected. Contrast of the horizontal strip containing the OD region is then enhanced using a series of image processing steps. The macula region is first detected in the OD strip using various morphological operations and connected component analysis. The fovea is located inside this detected macular region. The proposed method achieves an OD detection accuracy over 95% upon testing on seven public databases and on our locally developed database, University of Auckland Diabetic Retinopathy database (UoA-DR). The average OD boundary segmentation overlap score, sensitivity and fovea detection accuracy achieved are 0.86, 0.968 and 97.26% respectively.