Saliency-based segmentation of optic disc in retinal images

Accurate segmentation of optic disc (OD) is significant for the automation of retinal analysis and retinal diseases screening. This paper proposes a novel optic disc segmentation method based on the saliency. It includes two stages:optic disc location and saliency-based segmentation. In the location stage, the OD is detected using a matched template and the density of the vessels. In the segmentation stage, we treat the OD as the salient object and formulate it as a saliency detection problem. To measure the saliency of a region, the boundary prior and the connectivity prior are exploited. Then geodesic distance to the window boundary is computed to measure the cost the region spends to reach the window boundary. After a threshold and ellipse fitting, we obtain the OD. Experimental results on two public databases for OD segmentation show that the proposed method achieves the-state-of-the-art performance.