Efficient optic cup localization using regional propagation based on retinal structure priors

We present a regional propagation approach based on retinal structure priors to localize the optic cup in 2D fundus images, which is the primary image component clinically used for identifying glaucoma. This method provides three major contributions. First, it proposes processing of the fundus images at the superpixel level, which leads to more descriptive and effective features than those employed by pixel based techniques, without additional computational cost. Second, the proposed approach does not need manually labeled training samples, but uses the structural priors on relative cup and disc positions. Third, a refinement scheme that utilizes local context information is adopted to further improve the accuracy. Tested on the ORIGA-light clinical dataset, which comprises of 325 images from a population-based study, the proposed method achieves a 34.9% non-overlap ratio with manually-labeled ground-truth and a 0.104 absolute cup-to-disc ratio (CDR) error. This level of accuracy is much higher than the state-of-the-art pixel based techniques, with a comparable or even less computational cost.