Attention‑Guided Hybrid Deep Learning with Fibonacci and Annular Ring Handcrafted Features for Glaucoma Detection in...

Glaucoma, a major contributor to irreversible blindness, often progresses silently, making early detection vital. Manual interpretation of retinal fundus images requires expertise and is prone to variability across clinicians. To solve the issue, a novel automated classification framework is proposed that leverages handcrafted features extracted from retinal zones segmented through a Fibonacci-based annular ring division technique. Concentric regions centered on the optic disc enhance regional representation, especially in clinically significant zones. The classification pipeline employs a hybrid deep learning model combining 1D CNN layers, bidirectional LSTM units, and an attention mechanism, finalized by dense and softmax layers. Learned representations benefit from spatial and sequential modelling, with attention guiding focus toward informative regions. Extensive evaluation across publicly available datasets validates the effectiveness of the architecture. The model achieved classification accuracies of 98.48% on Drishti-GS, 97.98% on Origa, and 97.76% on RimOneV2. Subsets of HVD yielded 98.89% on HVD-Advance, 97.86% for HVD-Early, 97.28% for HVD-Binary class, and 95% for the multi-class classification. Consistent performance across diverse datasets highlights the reliability and clinical potential of the proposed glaucoma detection pipeline.