Simple and Robust Optic Disc Localisation Using Colour Decorrelated Templates

Automatic analysis of digital fundus images, where optic disc extraction is an essential part, is an active research topic in retinal image analysis. A simple, fast and robust optic disc localisation method using colour decorrelated templates is proposed which results an accurate location of the optic disc in colour fundus images. In the training stage, PCA is performed on the colour image data to determine an eigenspace (colour decorrelated template space) that characterises optic disc colour. The colour decorralated optic disc templates are extracted from the training images projected to the colour decorrelated template space. In the localisation stage, template matching is applied to locate optic disc using the colour decorrelated templates after projecting an unseen fundus image to the colour decorrelated template space. The proposed method is compared with a method from the literature on DIARETDB1, a publicly available fundus image database.