Optic Disc Detection Based on Saliency Detection and Attention Convolutional Neural Networks

The automatic analysis of retinal fundus images is of great significance in large-scale ocular pathologies screening, of which optic disc (OD) location is a prerequisite step. In this paper, we propose a method based on saliency detection and attention convolutional neural network for OD detection. Firstly, the wavelet transform based saliency detection method is used to detect the OD candidate regions to the maximum extent such that the intensity, edge and texture features of the fundus images are all considered into the OD detection process. Then, the attention mechanism that can emphasize the representation of OD region is combined into the dense network. Finally, it is determined whether the detected candidate regions are OD region or non-OD region. The proposed method is implemented on DIARETDB0, DIARETDB1 and MESSIDOR datasets, the experimental results of which demonstrate its superiority and robustness.