Segmentation of Retinal Vasculature using Active Contour Models (Snakes)

Characteristic of retinal vasculature has been an important indicator for many diseases such as hypertension and diabetes. A digital image analysis system can assist medical experts to make accurate diagnosis in an efficient manner. This project presents the computer based approach to the automated segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images. The detection of the retinal vessel is achieved by performing image enhancement using CLAHE followed by Bottom-hat morphological transformation. Active contour model (snake) that based on level sets, techniques of curve evolution, and Mumford-Shah functional for segmentation
is then used to segment out the detected retinal vessel and produce a complete retinal vasculature.