Snakes with Coordinate Regeneration Technique: An Application to Retinal Disc Boundary Detection

A modified snake method based on the novel idea of coordinate regeneration is presented and is tested on an object with complex concavities and on retinal images for locating the boundaries of optic discs, where the conventional snake methods fail. We have demonstrated that the use of conventional snake method with our proposed coordinate regeneration technique gives ultimate solution for finding the boundaries of complex objects. The proposed method requires a Gaussian blur of the object with a large kernel so that the snake can be initialised away from the object boundaries. In the second and third steps the blurring kernel size is reduced so that exact boundaries can be located. Coordinate regeneration is applied at each step which ultimately converges the snake (active contour) to exact boundaries. For complex objects like optic discs in retinal images, vessels act as snake distracters and some preimage processing is required before the proposed technique is applied. We are demonstrating this technique to find the boundary of optic discs in retinal images. In principle, this technique can be extended to find the boundary of any object in other modalities of medical imaging. Simulation results are presented to support the idea.