An efficient automatic method of Optic disc segmentation using region growing technique in retinal images

Segmentation of Optic disc (OD) from a retinal image is a essential step while developing automated screening systems for eye disease like diabetic retinopathy, Glaucoma etc. This paper proposes a method of automatic optic disk segmentation based on region growing technique with automatic seed selection. In this method centre of optic disk is considered as a seed to apply region growing technique to segment the optic disk from the preprocessed retinal image. Automatic detection of centre of optic disk is done by double windowing method. The algorithm uses image processing techniques like contrast adjustment, morphological operations & filtering to process the retinal image and to remove the blood vessels from the retinal image. The performance of optic disk segmentation by proposed method is compared with Optic disk segmentation by ophthalmologists and results are found convincing and efficient. The experimental results indicate this method of segmentation of the OD has good accuracy and also is computationally cheap.