High speed detection of optical disc in retinal fundus image

The first task in any retinal fundus image processing is to detect the optical disc, as this is the prime location in a fundus image from where all retinal blood vessels originate. In this paper, a faster method to detect retinal optical disc is proposed that uses mean intensity value of retinal image to detect the center of optical disc, which can be used in retinal image-based person authentication system or retinal disease diagnosis. A candidate-based approach on green channel of RGB fundus image is used to detect optical disc center location. The system has been successfully tested on several publicly available standard databases, namely: DRIVE, messidor, VARIA, VICAVR and DIARETDB_01 and produced 97.5, 97.8, 94, 93.1 and 86.5 % accuracies, respectively. It is observed that if lower recognition accuracy is accepted (from 100 to 97.5 %) on DRIVE database, the detection speed increases from 7 to 2 s per image, which is faster than any other previous methods with such high accuracies.