Automated detection of fovea in fundus images based on vessel-free zone and adaptive Gaussian template

• We developed a method for automated detection of fovea in fundus images based on vessel-free zone and adaptive Gaussian template.
• The proposed method constrained the search region based on the vessel-free region and did not need the segmentation of vessels.
• The proposed method was evaluated using three publicly available databases (DIARETDB0, DIARETDB1 and MESSIDOR).
• The proposed method obtained the fovea detection accuracy of 97.0%.

This study developed a computerised method for fovea centre detection in fundus images. In the method, the centre of the optic disc was localised first by the template matching method, the disc–fovea axis (a line connecting the optic disc centre and the fovea) was then determined by searching the vessel-free region, and finally the fovea centre was detected by matching the fovea template around the centre of the axis. Adaptive Gaussian templates were used to localise the centres of the optic disc and fovea for the images with different resolutions. The proposed method was evaluated using three publicly available databases (DIARETDB0, DIARETDB1 and MESSIDOR), which consisted of a total of 1419 fundus images with different resolutions. The proposed method obtained the fovea detection accuracies of 93.1%, 92.1% and 97.8% for the DIARETDB0, DIARETDB1 and MESSIDOR databases, respectively. The overall accuracy of the proposed method was 97.0% in this study.