Automated optic disk boundary detection by modified active contour model

This paper presents a novel deformable-model-based algorithm for fully automated detection of optic disk boundary in fundus images. The proposed method improves and extends the original snake (deforming-only technique) in two aspects: clustering and smoothing update. The contour points are first self-separated into edge-point group or uncertain-point group by clustering after each deformation, and these contour points are then updated by different criteria based on different groups. The updating process combines both the local and global information of the contour to achieve the balance of contour stability and accuracy. The modifications make the proposed algorithm more accurate and robust to blood vessel occlusions, noises, ill-defined edges and fuzzy contour shapes. The comparative results show that the proposed method can estimate the disk boundaries of 100 test images closer to the groundtruth, as measured by mean distance to closest point (MDCP) <3 pixels, with the better success rate when compared to those obtained by gradient vector flow snake (GVF-snake) and modified active shape models (ASM).