Automated glaucoma detection using quasi-bivariate variational mode decomposition from fundus images

Abstract

Glaucoma is a critical and irreversible neurodegenerative eye disorder caused by damaging optical nerve head due to increased intra-ocular pressure within the eye. Detection of glaucoma is a critical job for ophthalmologists. This study presents a novel and more accurate method for automated glaucoma detection using quasi-bivariate variational mode decomposition (QB-VMD) from digital fundus images. In total, 505 fundus images are decomposed using QB-VMD method which gives band limited sub-band images (SBIs) centred around a particular frequency. These SBIs are smooth and free from mode mixing problems. The glaucoma detection accuracy depends on the most useful features as it captured appropriate information. Seventy features are extracted from QB-VMD SBIs. Extracted features are normalised and selected using ReliefF method. Selected features are then fed to singular value decomposition to reduce their dimensionality. Finally, the reduced features are classified using least square support vector machine classifier. The obtained glaucoma detection accuracies are 85.94 and 86.13% using three- and ten-fold cross validation, respectively. Obtained results are better than the existing. It may become a suitable method for ophthalmologists to examine eye disease more accurately using fundus images. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2019