Automatic localization and segmentation of Optic Disc in retinal fundus images through image processing techniques

The Optic Disc location detection and extraction are main role of automatically analyzing of retinal image. Ophthalmologists analyze the Optic Disc for finding the presence or absence of retinal diseases viz. Glaucoma, Diabetic Retinopathy, Occlusion, Orbital lymphangioma, Papilloedema, Pituitary Cancer, Open-angle glaucoma etc. In this paper, we attempted to localize and segment the Optic Disc region of retinal fundus images by template matching method and morphological procedure. The optic nerve is originate in the brightest region of retinal image and it act as a main region to detect the retinal diseases using the ratio of cup and disc(CDR) and the ratio between Optic rim & center of the Optic Disc. The proposed work localizes and segments the Optic Disc then the corresponding center points & diameter of retinal fundus images are determined. We have considered the Gold Standard Database (available at public repository) that comprises of 30 retinal fundus images to our experiments. The location of Optic Disc is detected, segmented for all images and the center & diameter of segmented Optic Disc are evaluated against the Optic Disc center points & diameter (ground truth specified by ophthalmologist experts). The Optic Disc centers & diameter identified through our method are near close to ground truth provided by the ophthalmologist experts. The proposed system achieves 98.7% accuracy in locating the Optic Disc while compare with other Optic Disc detection methodologies such as Active Contour Model, Fuzzy C-Means, Artificial Neural Network.