Retinal Image Analysis

One of the most active fields of work in the VARPA Group is the ophtalmology, in particular the analysis of eye fundus images (retinal images). The retinal image processing is a very interesting and demanding field, having a lot of practical applications, such as the development of applications for massive medical revision and the research in pharmacology effectiveness.

Currently, we are focused on the following topics:

• Drusen detection
• Red lession detection
• Automatic computaton of the Arteriolar-to-Venular Ratio

Biometrics

Retinal vessel tree is a suitable biometric pattern as it's unique for each individual, it's very hard to forge and, unless some pathologies arise, it doesn't change in time. In our group, we have developed an authentication system based on this retinal vessel tree and we are currently working on the individual characterization based on the feature extraction from the vessel tree. This will allow to build an easily and more robust biometric pattern.

Perceptual organization

Perceptual grouping refers to the human visual ability to extract significant image relations from lower-level primitive image features without any knowledge of the image content and group them to obtain meaningful higher-level structure. Our experience in perceptual organisation consists in the design and implementation of a fully automatic framework for the detection of structured objects in 2D images.

Deformable Models

We have developed methodologies for both 2D and 3D segmentation and reconstruction based on deformable models. We have developed procedures to overcome some of the limitations of the classical deformable models. Also, we have apply evolutionary techniques to the deformation process.