A Review of Automatic Drusen Detection and Segmentation from Retinal Images

Age-related Macular Degeneration (ARMD) is a degenerative condition of the center of the retina which is associated with aging. ARMD is a leading cause of vision loss in adults 50 years of age or older in many countries around the world. Macular drusen have often been found at the early stages of ARMD. The progressive of ARMD is so slowly that people notice just little changes in their vision. ARMD may result in a complete loss of central vision. Nowadays, ophthalmologists use fundus camera to examine patient’s retina. The retinal image is then captured and analyzed its appearance to locate the abnormalities, e.g., drusen. Since a large number of retinal images are taken each day, ophthalmologists have to spend much time in screening process. To help reduce screening time, many automatic screening methods have been proposed for detecting and segmenting drusen and those techniques were reviewed in this paper. This paper can then be used as an immediate starting ground for researchers in this field.