An Automated Technique for Optic Disc Detection in Retinal Fundus Images Using Elephant Herding Optimization Algorithm

Background: Glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy are known to be the prime reasons for causing irrevocable blindness in the world. However, the complete vision loss can be obstructed through regular screening of the eye to detect the disorder at an early stage. Objective: In this paper, we have presented a novel nonlinear optimization technique that helps in automatic detection of the optic disc boundary from retinal fundus images thereby satisfying the anatomical constraints by using elephant herding optimization algorithm. Methods: In our approach, median filter has been used for the noise removal in retinal images. The pre-processed image is passed to the metaheuristic algorithm known as Elephant Herding Optimization algorithm. Results: The proposed technique for optic disc segmentation has been applied and tested on four standard publicly available datasets namely DRIVE, DIARETDB1, STARE and DRIONS-DB. The ground truth of the optic disc boundary has been collected from two experts of glaucoma: Expert A and Expert B who are specialists of glaucoma. The quantitative and qualitative analysis has been done to evaluate the performance of optic disc segmentation techniques. Conclusion: The proposed technique for optic disc detection helps to obtain the smooth boundaries in retinal fundus images. The aim has been successfully achieved by proposing an approach using EHO to achieve optimized solution. The effectiveness of the approach has been evaluated on for benchmark datasets and the acquired results have shown the accuracy values to be 100% for DRIVE, 100% for DIARETDB1, 99.25% for STARE and 99.99% for DRIONS-DB.