Ant Colony Optimization-based method for optic cup segmentation in retinal images

Abstract

An accurate detection of the cup region in retinal images is necessary to obtain relevant measurements for glaucoma detection. In this work, we present an Ant Colony Optimization-based method for optic cup segmentation in retinal fundus images. The artificial agents will construct their solutions influenced by a heuristic that combines the intensity gradient of the optic disc area and the curvature of the vessels. On their own, the exploration capabilities of the agents are limited; however, by sharing the experience of the entire colony, they are capable of obtaining accurate cup segmentations, even in images with a weak or non-obvious pallor. This method has been tested with the RIM-ONE dataset, yielding an average overlapping error of 24.3% of the cup segmentation and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.7957 using the cup to disc ratio for glaucoma assessment.