Texture Analysis for the Segmentation of Optic Disc in Retinal Images

This paper describes ongoing work on the segmentation of the optic disc in retinal images using pixel classification and circular template matching. The pixel property used for classification is based on texture. Two texture measurements were used, Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features (BRIEF) and a rotation invariant BRIEF (OBRIEF). This texture measurement is chosen because it can address the illumination issues of the retinal images and has a lower degree of computational complexity than most of the existing texture measurement methods currently used in the literature. The method was tested on a set of 196 images composed of 110 healthy retina images and 86 glaucomatous images. The average mean overlapping ratio between the true optic disc region and the segmented region is 0.81 and 0.82 for BRIEF and OBRIEF respectively. Comparison with a method based on the Hough Transform and Snake is also provided.