Automatic Optic Disc Detection in Color Retinal Images by Local Feature Spectrum Analysis

Te optic disc is a key anatomical structure in retinal images. Te ability to detect optic discs in retinal images plays an important role in automated screening systems. Inspired by the fact that humans can fnd optic discs in retinal images by observing some local features, we propose a local feature spectrum analysis (LFSA) that eliminates the infuence caused by the variable spatial positions of local features. In LFSA, a dictionary of local features is used to reconstruct new optic disc candidate images, and the utilization frequencies of every atom in the dictionary are considered as a type of “spectrum” that can be used for classifcation. We also employ the sparse dictionary selection approach to construct a compact and representative dictionary. Unlike previous approaches, LFSA does not require the segmentation of vessels, and its method of considering the varying information in the retinal images is both simple and robust, making it well-suited for automated screening systems. Experimental results on the largest publicly available dataset indicate the efectiveness of our proposed approach.