Spline-based refinement of vessel contours in fundus retinal images for width estimation

This paper presents a novel algorithm for refining the vessel contours obtained from retinal binary vessel maps. The refinement improves vessel width estimation. Our approach is based on fitting the two contours of each vessel in the binary map with a cubic spline curve, introducing a parallelism constraint between the two splines. The algorithm, evaluated on the REVIEW database, has a comparable accuracy to that of specialized, sophisticated width estimation algorithms.