Extraction of blood vessels in ophthalmic color images of human retinas

Abstract

This paper presents a strategy for the extraction of blood vessels from ophthalmoscopic color images of the fundus of human retinas. To extract the vascular network, morphology operators were used, primarily maximum of openings and sum of valleys, and secondly a reconstruction by dilation from two images obtained using threshold by hysteresis. To extract the skeleton of the resulting vascular network, morphological thinning and pruning algorithms were used. Results obtained represent a starting point for future work related to the detection of anomalies in the vascular network and techniques for personal authentication. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.