Image Processing Techniques for Automatic Detection of Glaucoma. Abstract–The review paper describes the application of image processing techniques for automatic detection of Glaucoma. Large percentages of people suffer from Glaucoma in rural and semi urban areas in India as well as world over. Image processing techniques greatly help to diagnosing Glaucoma. Glaucoma is dangerous eye disease causes permanent blindness when it is untreated in earlier stages. Until the disease reaches to an advanced stages it shows no symptoms hence regular eye test is very important. The automatic analysis involves using structural and texture features of retinal images. The key image processing elements to detect Glaucoma include image registration, fusion, segmentation, feature extraction, enhancement, pattern matching, image classification, analysis and statistical measurements. In developing and under developing countries large number of people are suffering from ophthalmic diseases like Glaucoma, Age related Macular Degeneration (AMD), Diabetic Retinopathy, Diabetic hypertension. A large deficit of ophthalmologists exists in these regions. Year after year the number of medical assistants is decreasing, while demand for healthcare is increasing and expected to touch 40% by 2020. The techniques mentioned in the present review have certain advantages and disadvantages. Based on this study, one can easily determine which technique provides optimum result.

Keywords– Glaucoma, image registration, fusion, segmentation, enhancement, Diabetic hypertension, Diabetic Retinopathy.

I. INTRODUCTION

Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases with common characteristics that result in damage of human visual system. The changes occurred in retinal structures such as eye‟s optic nerve, which gradually lead to blindness or vision loss. Glaucoma is the second largest cause of blindness in the world. According to survey around 2.3% of the total population got affected by glaucoma and is predicted to affect around 11.1 million people (around 2.86%) by 2020 [1]. Among the retinal diseases 13% of cases being affected by glaucoma. One among 200 people aged 40 and one among 10 who age 80 are suffering from glaucoma. Very dangerous thing about glaucoma is that it shows no symptoms in earlier stages, that is no pain, no vision change etc. If remain untreated, the patient may start losing his side vision.
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