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A Novel Method To Detect Fovea From Color Fundus Images
A Novel Method To Detect Fovea From Color Fundus Images
1 Introduction
Fig. 1 Fundamental
components of fundus image
which is oval in shape having diameter equal to 1.5 mm and it is nearly equal
to the diameter of optic disc. Fovea is the most sensitive region with majority of
photoreceptors present. It is responsible for central, most accurate and color vision.
Any deposit on the foveal region creates blindness to central vision.
Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a problem with greater significance and huge finan-
cial burden on the global economy with its incidence is growing at epidemic levels
[1]. Diabetes leads to complications such as diabetic retinopathy (DR). DR is the
prevalent cause of vision loss in the working-age population. Patients with DR can
get affected by diabetic macular edema (DME) at any time during its progression.
The leakage of blood vessels causes accumulation of fluid in the macula region is
responsible for DME. Severity grading of DME is based on presence of accumulated
fluid corresponding to the distance from fovea center. Hence, automatic detection of
fovea is essential in the development of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for
DR and DME. Computer-aided detection of edema is essential for early diagnosis
of disease.
2 Related Work
Identification of fovea has got less consideration; this is likely because fuzzy appear-
ance and low contrast of fovea with its background make its detection difficult and
challenging. There are few methodologies presented in the literature.
Tobin et al. [2] proposed technique for fovea localization. Optic disc is located and
vascular arch is estimated using parabolic model. Location of fovea is decided using
these two anatomical structures. Sagar et al. [3] detect OD using principle compo-
nent analysis (PCA) and blood vessels are mask out using mathematical morphologic
operation. Fovea is determined using 1% of the darkest pixels. Niemeijer et al. [4]
utilized point distribution model along with cost function to estimate the location of
fovea. Welfer et al. [5] used morphological operation on region of interest (ROI),
A Novel Method to Detect Fovea from Color Fundus Images 959
which is determined using the relationship of OD and fovea. Chin et al. [6] made use
of minimum vessel density region for the localization of fovea center. Vessel density
is calculated using binary vessel mask. Akram et al. [7] determined macula using
the feature set and then classify it as macula or non-macula using Gaussian mixture
model classifier. Feature set is determined by detecting all dark regions from retina.
Aquino et al. [8] detected fovea center using the positional statistics with respect
to OD and vessel tree. Kao et al. [9] locate OD by template matching and then
fovea is searched in vessel free region. Medhi and Dandapat [10] utilized intensity
information of processed red plane of color fundus image for localization of fovea.
Molina-Casado et al. [11] made use of template matching technique along with corre-
lation for the detection of macula blob. Tan et al. [12] used seven-layer convolutional
neural network (CNN) to classify each pixel of retinal image as background, blood
vessels, OD, and fovea.
We proposed a novel and robust technique for automatic fovea detection, which
can be used in automatic DR screening projects. The algorithm initially searches for
the fovea region with prior information that it is the dark intensity region. Lastly, it
segments the fovea using the morphological operations. The major advantage of the
presented methodology is that it does not require prior identification of optic disc,
blood vessels, and/or any other fundus pathologies, thus reducing the complexity
in identification. The accuracy of the technique is tested on five publicly accessible
retinal datasets.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows; Sect. 3 describes proposed method,
the result is discussed in Sects. 4 and 5 give the conclusion.
3 Proposed Method
The green plane g = (g(i))i∈ is defined over ∈ R2 . Figure 2a, b shows the color
fundus and its g plane. Green plane shows better contrast between foveal region and
background as compared to red and blue plane. Thus, for the further analysis, green
Uneven illumination in the retinal atlas caused while capturing the fundus image
poses certain challenges in the identification of retinal structures including fovea.
Hence, ROI enhancement is done in order to create ease in fovea detection. It is done
by utilizing adaptive manifold filter [13] for the purpose which has the capability to
accelerate filtering and deliver high-quality enhanced image. In this filter, weighted
average of the input gray scale pixels is done and a new set of pixel gray scale is
produced. The weights of the filter are given by kernel φ. Filtering the image with φ
gives a new image Ienhc :
n j ∈s φ(nˆi − nˆj )I R O Ii
Ienhci = (2)
n j ∈s φ(nˆi − nˆj )
A Novel Method to Detect Fovea from Color Fundus Images 961
−1
1
φ (nˆi − nˆj ) = ex p(− (nˆi − nˆj ) T
(nˆi − nˆj ) (3)
2
where is a diagonal covariance matrix of size d × d. The nˆi and nˆj are neighbor-
hoods around the corresponding pixel.
Subtract the image Ienhc from I R O I and multiply with detailed amplification factor
A as
Iampl = I R O I + (I R O I − Ienhc ) × A (4)
where the value of A is equal to 10. Image is filtered using multidimensional Gaussian
filter where input array values outside the bounds of the array are assigned to the
nearest array border. Mapping of intensity values of the image obtained by applying
a multidimensional filter to the newly obtained values in such a way that 1% of data
is saturated to low and high intensities. The output image is as shown in Fig. 4c. The
output image so obtained is denoted by Iampl .
Fig. 4 a Original image, Image after: b ROI selection, c enhancement, d thresholding, e mor-
phological opening, f selecting largest connected component, g mapping to original size, h fovea
detection, i fovea localization
962 S. Pachade et al.
The fovea is the largest connected region and the unwanted detected regions
are much smaller than that. All the connected components of Iopen are detected,
and labels are given. To segment out only the fovea, calculate the area of all the
labeled connected components and arrange them in descending order, i.e., connected
component with the largest area is first one. Only first component is selected as
shown in Fig. 4f. Detected fovea is shown in Fig. 4g. Finally, center is detected using
regional property. The total algorithm of proposed method is given in Algorithm 1.
A Novel Method to Detect Fovea from Color Fundus Images 963
4 Result
Results of the presented algorithm are analyzed on 1543 images of five publicly
accessible databases.
From DRIVE [14] 40/40 images detects fovea accurately, 168/169 from HEI-
MED [15], 88/89 from DIARETDB1 [16], 45/45 from HRF [17] and 1184/1200
from MESSIDOR [18] database. The presented algorithm for fovea detection resulted
in a success rate of 99.38%. The performance of presented method is compared with
various methods present in literature and is tabulated in Table 1. Our experimental
results are promising and show improvement over previous methods present.
964 S. Pachade et al.
5 Conclusion
In this paper, we have proposed a novel technique for the detection of fovea which is
essential for analysis of diabetic macular edema. Furthermore, it can be utilized with
vessel detection method to boost the performance of red lesion, retinitis pigmentosa,
and/or scar detection. The proposed technique is efficient since there is no need of
detecting optic disc and blood vessels. The proposed method can be used in the
development of an automatic diagnosis system. In future, it can be incorporated with
the detection of fovea and pathologies in the fovea region from optical coherence
tomography images for better analysis of DME.
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