Optic disc detection in the presence of strong technical artifacts

•Optic disc (OD) detection and segmentation in the presence of strong technical artefacts.•Two-stage approach of OD-detection and segmentation advancing pre-existing methods.•OD detection via analysis of vessel orientation, vessel thickness and brightness information.•Improved OD segmentation by loess-smoothing of the OD-radius depending on circular angle.•Improved detection rate of 95.9% (5052 Images, public + private), overlap ratio of 88.8%.