Learning-based approach for the automatic detection of the optic disc in digital retinal fundus photographs

The optic disc is an important feature in the retina. We propose a method for the detection of the optic disc based on a supervised learning scheme. The method employs pixel and local neighbourhood features extracted from the ROI of a digital retinal fundus photograph. A support vector machine based classification mechanism is used to classify each image point as belonging to the cup and retina. The proposed method is evaluated on a sample image set of 68 retinal fundus images. The results show a high correlation (r>0.9) with the ground truth segmentation, with an overlap error of 6.02%, and found to be comparable to the inter-observer variability based on an independent second observer segmentation of the same data set.