AN EFFICIENT APPROACH TO LOCATE OPTIC DISC CENTER, BLOOD VESSELS AND MACULA IN RETINAL IMAGES

Abstract

Locating the Optic Disc (OD) and Macula Center (MC) is the main step in the automatic extraction of retinal anatomical structures for Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). In this work, a variety of vessel segmentation methods have been adopted for the identification of OD in retinal images. In order to locate OD, different segmentation algorithms like matched filter, spatially weighed Fuzzy C-means and threshold are used to detect the blood vessels from the retinal image. Matching the expected directional pattern of the retinal blood vessels is proposed to locate the OD center. The proposed vessel direction filter is resized and OD center is measured. Macula center (fovea) is located at a constant distance from optic disc. A new method with geometric approach is proposed for macula detection. The proposed methods have been evaluated using a STARE and DRIVE datasets which contains both normal and diseased retina. The proposed methods are successfully adopted for segmentation of blood vessels and location of OD and MC in both normal and abnormal images.