Infant Retinal Images Optic Disk Detection Using Active Contours

The paper presents a technique to identify the boundary of the optic disc in infant retinal digital images using an approach based on active contours (snakes). The technique can be used to be develop a automate system in order to help the ophthalmologist's diagnosis the retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) disease which may occurred on preterm infant,. The optic disc detection is one of the fundamental step which could help to create an automate diagnose system for the doctors we use a new kind of active contour (snake) method has been developed by Chenyang et. al. [1], based on a new type of external force field, called gradient vector flow, or GVF. GVF is computed as a diffusion of the gradient vectors of a gray-level or binary edge map derived from the image. The testing results on a set of infant retinal ROP images verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. We show that GVF has a large capture range and it's able to move snakes into boundary concavities of optic disc and finally the optic disk boundary was determined.