Automated glaucoma diagnosis using bit-plane slicing and local binary pattern techniques

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Glaucoma is a ocular disorder which causes irreversible damage to the retinal nerve fibers. The diagnosis of glaucoma is important as it may help to slow down the progression. The available clinical methods and imaging techniques are manual and require skilled supervision. For the purpose of mass screening, an automated system is needed for glaucoma diagnosis which is fast, accurate, and helps in reducing the burden on experts.

METHODS: In this work, we present a bit-plane slicing (BPS) and local binary pattern (LBP) based novel approach for glaucoma diagnosis. Firstly, our approach separates the red (R), green (G), and blue (B) channels from the input color fundus image and splits the channels into bit planes. Secondly, we extract LBP based statistical features from each of the bit planes of the individual channels. Thirdly, these features from the individual channels are fed separately to three different support vector machines (SVMs) for classification. Finally, the decisions from the individual SVMs are fused at the decision level to classify the input fundus image into normal or glaucoma class.

RESULTS: Our experimental results suggest that the proposed approach is effective in discriminating normal and glaucoma cases with an accuracy of 99.30% using 10-fold cross validation.

CONCLUSIONS: The developed system is ready to be tested on large and diverse databases and can assist the ophthalmologists in their daily screening to confirm their diagnosis, thereby increasing accuracy of diagnosis.