Glaucoma is an eye disease that can cause loss of vision by damaging the optic nerve. It is the world's second leading cause of blindness after cataracts. Early diagnosis of glaucoma is a key to prevent permanent blindness as it has no noticeable symptoms in its early stages. Color fundus photography is used for examining the optic disc (OD) which is an important step in the diagnoses of glaucoma. This is done by estimating the cup-to-disc ratio (CDR). In this paper, we proposed a Cup Disc Encoder Decoder Network (CDED-Net) for the joint segmentation of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC). We have eradicated the preprocessing and post-processing steps to reduce the computational cost of the overall system. Segmentation of (OD) and OC is modeled as a semantic pixel-wise labeling problem. The model was trained on the DRISHTI-GS, RIM-ONE and REFUGE datasets. Experiments show that our CDED-Net system achieves state-of-the-art OD and OC segmentation results on these datasets.

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<p class="Default">Date sector is a considerate sector worldwide with an estimated trade value equivalent to about 3.72 billion Saudi Riyals (SR) in 2013. Enhancing marketing efficiency of dates becomes imperative to nations that date sector has a special status in their economies and social heritage such that of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.</p><p class="Default">This research paper is targeted to estimate the marketing efficiency of dates at different marketing channels qualitatively using a typical five level LIKERT scale and quantitatively using the Two-Stage Data Envelopment Analysis (2s DEA), to estimate the potential economic impact of improving marketing efficiency on the date marketing channels and on the national economy, and to introduce a set of policies and mechanisms that enhance the competitiveness of the Saudi dates at the local and international markets.</p>The estimated results showed that the total market value of the Saudi dates is about 22.65 billion SR annually, and there is a great potential to improve date marketing efficiency to achieve an additional 30 per cent of value added to traders and the national economy, equivalent to about 6.88 billion SR annually. The research paper concluded with a set of policies and mechanisms to enhance the marketing efficiency and the competitiveness of the Saudi dates at the local and international markets.

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