Implementation of Geodesic Active Contour Approach for Pigment Spots Segmentation on the Iris Surface

The aim of this paper is to study the effectiveness of geodesic active contour approach to segment the pigment spots on iris surface. Pigment spot is an abnormal marker that appears on the iris surface, which may lead to eye diseases. The multi appearance, scattered location and dynamic shape of the pigment spots on the iris surface make them very difficult to detect using automatic segmentation method. Therefore, this paper presents the preliminary works that observe the efficiency and accuracy of geodesic active contour approach to automatically segment the pigment spots on iris surface. Miles database and "lu_wei_feb_2006" dataset are used in this study. The results of the conducted experiment show that geodesic active contour approach able to correctly and accurately detect up to 77% and 90% of the pigment spots in Miles database and "lu_wei_feb_2006" dataset, respectively.