Automatic Optic Disc Center and Boundary Detection in Color Fundus Images

Accurately detection of retinal landmarks, like optic disc, is an important step in the computer aided diagnosis frameworks. This paper presents an efficient method for automatic detection of the optic disc’s center and estimating its boundary. The center and initial diameter of optic disc are estimated by employing an ANN classifier. The ANN classifier employs visual features of vessels and their background tissue to classify extracted main vessels of retina into two groups: the vessels inside the optic disc and the vessels outside the optic disc. To this end, average intensity values and standard deviation of RGB channels, average width and orientation of the vessels and density of the detected vessels their junction points in a window around each central pixel of main vessels are employed. The center of detected vessels, which are belonging to the inside of the optic disc region, is adopted as the optic disc center and the average length of them in vertical and horizontal directions is selected as initial diameter of the optic disc circle. Then exact boundary of the optic disc is extracted using radial analysis of the initial circle. The performance of the proposed method is measured on the publicly available DRIONS, DRIVE and DIARETDB1 databases and compared with several state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method shows much higher mean overlap (70.6%) in the same range of detection accuracy (97.7%) and center distance (12 pixels). The average sensitivity and predictive values of the proposed optic disc detection method are 80.3% and 84.6% respectively.