Regional Image Features Model for Automatic Classification between Normal and Glaucoma in Fundus and Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (SLO) Images

Abstract

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of blindness worldwide. There is no cure for glaucoma but detection at its earliest stage and subsequent treatment can aid patients to prevent blindness. Currently, optic disc and retinal imaging facilitates glaucoma detection but this method requires manual post-imaging modifications that are time-consuming and subjective to image assessment by human observers. Therefore, it is necessary to automate this process. In this work, we have first proposed a novel computer aided approach for automatic glaucoma detection based on Regional Image Features Model (RIFM) which can automatically perform classification between normal and glaucoma images on the basis of regional information. Different from all the existing methods, our approach can extract both geometric (e.g. morphometric properties) and non-geometric based properties (e.g. pixel appearance/intensity values, texture) from images and significantly increase the classification performance. Our proposed approach consists of three new major contributions including automatic localisation of optic disc, automatic segmentation of disc, and classification between normal and glaucoma based on geometric and non-geometric properties of different regions of an image. We have compared our method with existing approaches and tested it on both fundus and Scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) images. The experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches using either geometric or non-geometric properties. The overall glaucoma classification accuracy for fundus images is 94.4 % and accuracy of detection of suspicion of glaucoma in SLO images is 93.9 %.