Automatic Detection of Fovea in Retinal Images Using Fusion of Color Bands

This paper presents a new method for fovea detection in color retinal images. Automatic detection of this anatomical structure is a prerequisite for computer aided diagnosis of several retinal diseases, such as macular degeneration. The proposed algorithm detects the macula center by determining a region of interest (ROI) and taking into account optic disk (OD) coordinates and the fact that the central region, i.e. fovea, is a homogenous dark area without blood vessels. Our segmentation algorithm searches for the lowest mean color intensity window in the enhanced image that results from a fusion between the red and green channels. Then, tests were carried on three public benchmark databases, which constitute a total of 254 images.