Multi-scale Segmentation Of Retinal Images

Abstract

Tiny bright golden patches can be seen on the dark retinal ~ckground of some carriers of X-linked retinitis pigmentosa. an mcu~bl~ blinding d~sease. We are interested in analyzing ~antitatively these umque "tapetal-like reflex" patches in order to mcrease our understanding of the cellular mechanisms of the disease In ~s ~aper. we describe the multi-scale thresholding method and i~ appll~tion ~o. the segmentation of the tapetal-like reflex in high resoluuo~ digital fundus images. Multi-scale thresholding is a local thresholdmg method that generates results very similar to that of human intuition. Unlike other local thresholding methods. our method successfuI1y ignores small artifacts in dark regions and simultaneously gene.rat~ high resolution definitions of objects. Other segmentation applications where there are many bright objects on a darker background should profit from the use of multi-scale thresholding.