Sclera Segmentation for the Measurement of Conjunctival Injection

Conjunctival injection is the initial symptom of various eye diseases such as conjunctivitis, keratitis, or uveitis. The quantification of conjunctival injection may help the diagnosis and follow-up evaluation of various eye diseases. The size of the sclera is an important factor for the quantification of conjunctival injection. However, previous manual segmentation is time-consuming.Automatic segmentation is needed to extract the objective region of interest. This paper proposed a method based on the level set algorithm to segment the sclera from an anterior eye image. The initial model of the level set algorithm is calculated using the Lab color space, k-means algorithm and the geometric information. The level set algorithm was applied to the images in which the valley between the eyeball and skin was enhanced using the hessian analysis. This algorithm was tested with 52 images of the anterior eye segment. Results showed that the proposed method performs better than those with the level set algorithm using an arbitrary circle, or the region growing algorithm with color information. The proposed method for the segmentation of sclera may become an important component for the objective measurement of the conjunctival injection.