Deep random walk for drusen segmentation from fundus images

Abstract

This paper presents a deep random walk technique for drusen segmentation from fundus images. It is formulated as a deep learning architecture which learns deep representations from fundus images and specify an optimal pixel-pixel affinity. Specifically, the proposed architecture is mainly composed of three parts: a deep feature extraction module to learn both semantic-level and low-level representation of image, an affinity learning module to get pixel-pixel affinities for formulating the transition matrix of random walk and a random walk module which propagates manual labels. The power of our technique comes from the fact that the learning procedures for deep image representations and pixel-pixel affinities are driven by the random walk process. The accuracy of our proposed algorithm surpasses state-of-the-art drusen segmentation techniques as validated on the public STARE and DRIVE databases.