Appearance-based object detection in colour retinal images

Extraction of anatomical structures (landmarks), such as optic disk (OD), fovea and blood vessels, from fundus images is useful in automatic diagnosis. Current approaches largely use spatial relationship among the landmarks´ position for detection. In this paper, we present an appearance-based method for detecting fovea and OD from colour images. The strategy used for detection is based on improving the local contrast which is achieved by combining information from two spectral channels of the given image. The proposed method has been successfully tested on different datasets and the results show 96% detection for fovea and 91% detection for OD (a total of 502 and 531 images for fovea and OD are taken respectively).