Retinal vessel labeling technique

A retinal vessel classification procedure is proposed. In a first step, from the thinned vessel image, a vascular graph is extracted and filtered. Then the graph edges near the optic disc are localized and the main branches connected to these initial edges are identified. For each graph with at least two starting branches, various label configurations are used to classify the graph's secondary edges (connected to the main ones). For each main branch, the initial label is first propagated along the branch edges, then along each secondary edge. The label propagation ends in case of conflicts at crossings. The no error label configuration or the one with the most classified edges is retained. The main improvement of the proposed technique is that the initial manual labeling for the starting vessels of each graph it is no longer necessary.