Bilateral-ViT for Robust Fovea Localization

Abstract: The fovea is an important anatomical landmark of the retina. Detecting the location of the fovea is essential for the analysis of many retinal diseases. However, robust fovea localization remains a challenging problem, as the fovea region often appears fuzzy, and retina diseases may further obscure its appearance. This paper proposes a novel Vision Transformer (ViT) approach that integrates information both inside and outside the fovea region to achieve robust fovea localization. Our proposed network, named Bilateral-Vision-Transformer (Bilateral-ViT), consists of two network branches: a transformer-based main network branch for integrating global context across the entire fundus image and a vessel branch for explicitly incorporating the structure of blood vessels. The encoded features from both network branches are subsequently merged with a customized Multi-scale Feature Fusion (MFF) module. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is significantly more robust for diseased images and establishes the new state of the arts using the Messidor and PALM datasets.