Automatic Retinal Vasculature Structure Tracing and Vascular Landmark Extraction from Human Eye Image

Abstract

We present an effective algorithm for automatic tracing of vasculature structures and vascular landmark extraction of bifurcations and ending points. In this paper we deal with vascular patterns from digital images for personal identification. Vessel tracing algorithms are of interest in a variety of biometric and medical application such as personal identification, biometrics, and ophthalmic disorders like vessel change detection. However eye surface vasculature tracing has many problems which are subject to improper illumination, glare, fade-out, shadow and artifacts arising from reflection, refraction, and dispersion. The proposed algorithm on vascular tracing employs multi-stage processing of ten-layers as followings: Image Acquisition, Image Enhancement by gray scale retinal image enhancement, reducing background artifact and illuminations and removing interlacing minute characteristics of vessels, Vascular Structure Extraction by connecting broken vessels, extracting vascular structure using eight directional information, and extracting retinal vascular structure. Vascular Landmark Extraction of bifurcations and ending points. The results of automatic retinal vessel extraction using five different thresholds applied 34 eye images are presented. The results of vasculature tracing algorithm shows that the suggested algorithm can obtain not only robust and accurate vessel tracing but also vascular landmarks according to thresholds.