Segmentation of Retinal Arteries in Adaptive Optics Images

Nicolas Lermé (1) , Florence Rossant (2) , Isabelle Bloch (3) , Michel Pâques (4) , Edouard Koch (5)

1 LTCI - Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information
2 ISEP - Institut Supérieur d'Electronique de Paris
3 IMAGES - Image, Modélisation, Analyse, GEométrie, Synthèse
4 Institut de la Vision
5 CIC 503 - Centre d'Investigation Clinique [Paris]

In this paper, we present a method for automatically segmenting the walls of retinal arteries in adaptive optics images. To our best knowledge, this is the first method addressing this problem in such images. To achieve this goal, we propose to model these walls as four curves approximately parallel to a common reference line located near to the center of vessels. Once this line detected, the curves are simultaneously positioned as near as possible to the borders of walls using an original tracking procedure to cope with deformations along vessels. Then, their positioning is refined using a deformable model embedding a parallelism constraint. Such an approach enables us to control the distance of the curves to their reference line and improve the robustness to image noise. This model was evaluated on healthy subjects by comparing the results against segmentations from physicians. Noticeably, the error introduced by this model is smaller or very near to the inter-physicians error.

Mots clés: Active contours model; adaptive optics; approximate parallelism; retina imaging

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Imagerie médicale; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Nicolas Lermé, Florence Rossant, Isabelle Bloch, Michel Pâques, Edouard Koch. Segmentation of Retinal Arteries in Adaptive Optics Images. International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Aug 2014, Stockholm, Sweden. ⟨hal-02559347⟩