On chip implementation of a pixel-parallel approach for retinal vessel tree extraction

Retinal vessel tree extraction from angiography images plays an important role not only in the medical domain, but also in biometric identification applications. From the image processing point of view, many algorithms and strategies have been developed to deal with this topic. Although reliable results have been obtained, the main disadvantage in most of these proposals is still the high computation effort required. In this paper, a methodology to extract the retinal vessel tree has been developed, specially defined in terms of fine grain SIMD processing with the purpose of improving the computation time. The proposal has been implemented on a cellular processor array VLSI chip. The execution times for the main modules of the proposed algorithm have been included to show its capability.