BEAC-Net: Boundary-Enhanced Adaptive Context Network for Optic Disk and Optic Cup Segmentation

Abstract

Accurately segmenting the optic disk (OD) and optic cup (OC) on retinal fundus images is important for treating glaucoma. With the development of deep learning, some CNN-based methods have been implemented to segment OD and OC, but it is difficult to accurately segment OD and OC boundaries affected by blood vessels and the lesion area. To this end, we propose a novel boundary-enhanced adaptive context network (BEAC-Net) for OD and OC segmentation. Firstly, a newly designed efficient boundary pixel attention (EBPA) module enhances pixel-by-pixel feature capture to collect the boundary contextual information of OD and OC in the horizontal and vertical directions. In addition, background noise makes segmenting boundary pixels difficult. To this end, an adaptive context module (ACM) was designed, which simultaneously learns local-range and long-range information to capture richer context. Finally, BEAC-Net adaptively integrates the feature maps from different levels using the attentional feature fusion (AFF) module. In addition, we provide a high-quality retinal fundus image dataset named the 66 Vision-Tech dataset, which advances the field of diagnostic glaucoma. Our proposed BEAC-Net was used to perform extensive experiments on the RIM-ONE-v3, DRISHTI-GS, and 66 Vision-Tech datasets. In particular, BEAC-Net achieved a Dice coefficient of 0.8267 and an IoU of 0.8138 for OD segmentation and a Dice coefficient of 0.8057 and an IoU value of 0.7858 for OC segmentation on the 66 Vision-Tech dataset, achieving state-of-the-art segmentation results.