Detection of the optic disc in retinal images by means of ant colony optimization algorithm

Diabetic retinopathy has been revealed as the most common cause of blindness among people of working age. The colour fundus images have been the easiest way to analyse the eye fundus and prevent the progression of this ocular disease. An important prerequisite for automation is the segmentation of the main anatomical features in the image, particularly the optic disc. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is an optimization algorithm inspired by the foraging behaviour of some ant species that has been applied in image processing for edge detection. In this paper, this algorithm preceded by anisotropic diffusion is used for optic disc detection in retinal images. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach as the optic disc was located in all the images used, even in the images with great variability.

[1]  N. Otsu.  A threshold selection method from gray level histograms , 1979 .

[2]  Huiqi Li,et al.  Automated feature extraction in color retinal images by a model based approach , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[3]  R. A. Abdel-Ghafar,et al.  Detection and Characterisation of the Optic Disk in Glaucoma and Diabetic Retinopathy , 2004 .

[4]  Thomas Stützle,et al.  Ant colony optimization: artificial ants as a computational intelligence technique , 2006 .

[5]  Joachim Weickert,et al.  Anisotropic diffusion in image processing , 1996 .

[6]  Ahmed Wasif Reza,et al.  Automatic Tracing of Optic Disc and Exudates from Color Fundus Images Using Fixed and Variable Thresholds , 2009, Journal of Medical Systems.

[7]  J. Olson,et al.  Automatic detection of retinal anatomy to assist diabetic retinopathy screening , 2007, Physics in medicine and biology.

[8]  Jitendra Malik,et al.  Scale-Space and Edge Detection Using Anisotropic Diffusion , 1990, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[9]  Michael H. Goldbaum,et al.  Locating the optic nerve in a retinal image using the fuzzy convergence of the blood vessels , 2003, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[10]  Aliaa A. A. Youssif,et al.  Optic Disc Detection From Normalized Digital Fundus Images by Means of a Vessels' Direction Matched Filter , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[11]  Jiliu Zhou,et al.  An Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Image Edge Detection , 2010, 2010 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence.

[12]  Rangaraj M. Rangayyan,et al.  Detection of the Optic Nerve Head in Fundus Images of the Retina Using the Hough Transform for Circles , 2010, Journal of Digital Imaging.

[13]  Hae Yong Kim.  Gradient Histogram-Based Anisotropic Diffusion , 2005 .

[14]  Kevin Barraclough,et al.  I and i , 2001, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[15]  Guoliang Fan,et al.  An efficient algorithm for extraction of anatomical structures in retinal images , 2003, Proceedings 2003 International Conference on Image Processing (Cat. No.03CH37429).

[16]  Jyh-Charn S. Liu,et al.  Fractal-based Automatic Localization and Segmentation of Optic Disc in Retinal Images , 2007, 2007 29th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[17]  Enrico Grisan,et al.  Detection of optic disc in retinal images by means of a geometrical model of vessel structure , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[18]  Pascale Massin,et al.  A contribution of image processing to the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy-detection of exudates in color fundus images of the human retina , 2002, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[19]  G. Sapiro,et al.  Geometric partial differential equations and image analysis [Book Reviews] , 2001, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[20]  G. G. Stokes.  "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[21]  Juan Xu,et al.  Automated Optic Disk Segmentation Via a Modified Snake Technique , 2006, 2006 9th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision.

[22]  Hossein Nezamabadi-pour,et al.  Edge detection using ant algorithms , 2006, Soft Comput..

[23]  Swaminathan Ramakrishnan,et al.  An Approach to Identify Optic Disc in Human Retinal Images Using Ant Colony Optimization Method , 2010, Journal of Medical Systems.