Parameter-free optic disc detection

The paper presents a simple, parameter-free method to detect the optic disc in retinal images. It works efficiently for blurred and noisy images with a varying ratio OD/image size. The method works equally well on images with different characteristics which often cause standard methods to fail or require a new round of training. The proposed method has been tested on 214 infant and adult retinal images and has been compared against hand-drawn ground truths generated by experts. It displays consistently high OD detection rates without any prior training or adjustment of the parameters.