Saliency-Based Segmentation of Optic Disc in Retinal Images

Accurate segmentation of Optic disc (OD) is significant for the automation of retinal analysis and retinal diseases screening. This paper proposes a novel optic disc segmentation method based on the saliency. It includes two stages: optic disc location and saliency-based segmentation. In the location stage, the OD is detected using a matched template and the density of the vessels. In the segmentation stage, we treat the OD as the salient object and formulate it as a saliency detection problem. To measure the saliency of a region, the boundary prior and the connectivity prior are exploited. Geodesic distance to the window boundary is computed to measure the cost the region spends to reach the window boundary. After a threshold and ellipse fitting, we obtain the OD. Experimental results on two public databases for OD segmentation show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.