Optic disc localization using local vessel based features and support vector machine

Abstract

Optic disc is one of the fundamental regions located in the internal retina that helps ophthalmologists in analysis and early diagnosis of many retinal diseases such as optic atrophy, optic neuritis, papilledema, ischemic optic neuropathy, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. An accurate and early diagnosis requires an accurate optic disc examination. Presence of different retinal abnormalities and non-uniform illumination make optic disc localization a challenging task. There is a need to detect and localize optic disc from fundus images with high accuracy to make the diagnosis using Computer Aided Systems developed for ophthalmic disease diagnosis more reliable. Proposed algorithm provides a novel optic disc localization and segmentation technique that detects multiple candidate optic disc regions from fundus image using enhancement and segmentation. The proposed system then extracts a hybrid feature set for each candidate region consisting of vessel based and intensity based features which are finally fed to SVM classifier. Final decision of Optic disc region is done after computing Manhattan distance from the mean of training data feature matrix. The evaluation of proposed system has been done on publicly available datasets and one local dataset and results shows the validity of proposed system.