Investigation of Bilateral Similarity in Central Retinal Blood Vessels

Abstract

While our left and right eyes clearly have a high degree of external bilateral similarity, it is less obvious to what degree they have internal bilateral similarity. This is especially true for the central retinal blood vessels (CRBVs), which are responsible for supplying blood to retinas and also can be used as a strong biometric. In this paper, we investigate whether the CRBVs of the left and right retinas possess strong enough bilateral similarity so that we reliably tell whether a pair of the left and right retinas belong to a single subject. We evaluate and analyse the performance of both human- and deep neural network-based bilateral verification by experimenting on two publicly available data sets.