A novel equalization scheme for the selective enhancement of optical disc and cup regions and background suppression in fundus imagery

Abstract

The ratio of the diameters of Optic Cup (OC) and Optic Disc (OD), termed as ‘Cup to Disc Ratio’ (CDR), derived from the fundus imagery is a popular biomarker used for the diagnosis of glaucoma. Demarcation of OC and OD either manually or through automated image processing algorithms is error prone because of poor grey level contrast and their vague boundaries. A dedicated equalization which simultaneously compresses the dynamic range of the background and stretches the range of ODis proposed in this paper. Unlike the conventional GHE, in the proposed equalization, the original histogram is inverted and weighted nonlinearly before computing the Cumulative Probability Density (CPD). The equalization scheme is compared with Adaptive Histogram Equalization (AHE), Global Histogram Equalization (GHE) and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) in terms of the difference between the mean grey levels of OD and the background, using a quantitative metric known as Contrast Improvement Index (CII). The CII exhibited by CLAHE, GHE and the proposed scheme are 1.1977 ± 0.0326, 1.0862 ± 0.0304 and 1.3312 ± 0.0486, respectively.The proposed method is observed to be superior to CLAHE, GHE and AHE and it can be employed in Computerized Clinical Decision Support Systems (CCDSS) to improve the accuracy of localizing the OD and the computation of CDR.