Title: A novel method for automatic identification of fovea location and its centre in colour retinal fundus images

Authors: Bharati M. Reshmi; I.S. Rajesh; Bharathi Malakreddy A

Addresses: Department of Information Science and Engineering, Basaveshwara Engineering College, Bagalkot, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BMS Institute of Technology and Management, Bangalore, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BMS Institute of Technology and Management, Bangalore, India

Abstract: The identification of fovea region plays a significant role in the detection of diabetic maculopathy. The presence of exudates within 500 micrometre from fovea centre requires laser treatment as it is sign of sight threatening. An ophthalmologist can decide over the nature of the treatment depending upon the position of the exudates from the fovea. Hence it is very important to identify fovea and its centre with high accuracy. In this work, we have proposed a novel algorithm for identification of fovea location and its centre in colour retinal fundus images. The novelty of this work aims at an approach where fovea location and its centre identification are done excluding blood vessels and OD. Initially, the grid is drawn over the retinal image, then the designed algorithm searches for region of interest (ROI) for the candidate fovea region by considering the four coordinate points. Finally, by using dark intensity property of fovea and morphological operations, fovea location and its centre is identified. The proposed method is simple, robust and it is tested on a publicly available MESSIDOR database and an accuracy of 97.37% is achieved.

Keywords: diabetic retinopathy; diabetic maculopathy; optic disc; region of interest; ROI; blood vessels.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMEI.2021.113390

International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, 2021 Vol.13 No.2, pp.103 - 110

Received: 06 Nov 2018
Accepted: 08 Mar 2019
Published online: 03 Mar 2021 *

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