Localization and segmentation of Optic Disk (OD) is an important prerequisite for automatic detection of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) from digital retinal fundus images. Considerable research has been done to isolate OD with varying degrees of success but on a limited number of images. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) coupled with a modified Structural Similarity Index Measure (m-SSIM) for localization of OD. We have tested our method on 100 normal retinal images (achieving 100 % success) and 232 diseased retinal images (achieving 75% success), thereby demonstrating a significant improvement over two other existing methods.
S. Balasubramanian, Srikanth Khanna, V. Chandrasek