Automated Detection of Optic Disc from Digital Retinal Fundus Images for Screening Systems of Diabetic Retinopathy

Optic disc(OD)detection is a main step while developing automated screening systems for diabetic retinopathy.We present a method to automatically locate and extract the OD in digital retinal fundus images.Based on the property that main blood vessels gather in OD,the method starts with Otsu thresholding segmentation to obtain candidate regions of OD.Consequently,the main blood vessels which are segmented in H channel of color fundus images in Hue saturation value(HSV)space.Finally,a weighted vessels’direction matched filter is proposed to roughly match the direction of the main blood vessels to get the OD center which is used to pick the true OD out from the candidate regions of OD.The proposed method was evaluated on a dataset containing 100 fundus images of both normal and diseased retinas and the accuracy reaches 98%.Furthermore,the average time cost in processing an image is 1.3 s.Results suggest that the approach is reliable,and can efficiently detect OD from fundus images.