A Region Growing method of Optic Disc segmentation in retinal images

Optic Disc segmentation is necessary for earlier diagnosis of glaucoma. Optic Disc segmentation of retinal images is done here using Region Growing method. The input retinal image is first preprocessed using gray scale conversion and adaptive histogram equalization technique. Inorder to perform Optic Disc segmentation the next step is to remove the blood vessels that originate from the optic disc. The blood vessels are detected and the vessels subtraction is done. Morphological operations such as dilation and erosion is done. Then the blood vessels removed image is smoothened using median filtering. Then the region growing algorithm is applied to the resultant image. Thus the segmented optic disc is obtained. This method is applied because it performs well with respect to noise. It can also provide images with clear edges and its simple. This technique is efficient compared with the thresholding method of optic disc segmentation.