Accurate and Efficient Segmentation of Optic Disc and Optic Cup in Retinal Images Integrating Multi-View Information

Glaucoma is an eye disease which is one of the most common causes of blindness. Accurate optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) segmentation play a critical role for detecting glaucoma. Considering that the existing approaches can’t effectively integrate the multi-view information deriving from shape and appearance to sufficiently describe OD and OC for segmentation, Locally Statistical Active Contour Model with the Information of Appearance and Shape (LSACM-AS) and Modified Locally Statistical Active Contour Model with the Information of Appearance and Shape (MLSACM-AS) are proposed in this paper. The main contributions are as below: (1) we introduce the Locally Statistical Active Contour Model (LSACM) to address the commonly occurred intensity inhomogeneity phenomenon caused by imperfection of image devices or illumination variations. (2) In order to overcome the common effects caused by pathological changes (i.e., peripapillary atrophy (PPA)) and vessel occlusion in OD and OC segmentation, we integrate the local image probability information around the point of interest from a multi-dimensional feature space into our model to preserve the integrity of the OD and OC structures. (3) Since the segmentation objects have the similar ellipse shape structure, we incorporate the shape priori constraint information into our model to further improve the robustness of the variations found in and around objects regions. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed models, an available publicly DRISHTI-GS database is employed in this paper. Seen from the abundant experiments, the proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the obtained qualitative and quantitative results.