21st Iranian Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICBME 2014), Biomedical Engineering Faculty, Amirkabir University of
Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran, Nov 26-28, 2014
A Rotation Invariant Retina Identification Algorithm
using Tessellation-based Spectral Feature
Mahrokh Khakzar
Department of Electrical Engineering,
Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University,
Isfahan, Iran.
m.khakzar@sel.iaun.ac.ir
Abstract— In this paper, a rotation-invariant retina identification
algorithm based on tessellation of frequency spectrum is
developed. In this algorithm, the proposed tessellation scheme
provides rotation invariant, multi resolution and optimized
features with low computational for our retina identification
algorithm. The proposed algorithm is structured in two parts
namely feature extraction and decision making. First step is
forming feature vectors by applying proposed tessellation scheme
on frequency spectrum of vessel skeleton of retinal image. Then, a
specific scenario is defined based on energy spectrum of vessels to
identify each individual. Finally, Euclidean distance criterion is
used to evaluate the accuracy of proposed tessellation scheme.
Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm obtains
the accuracy rate of 99.29 % in presence of rotation and multi
resolution samples.
Keywords- tessellation-based spectral feature; retinal image; energy
spectrum; radial partitioning.
I. INTRODUCTION
Recently, there has been a vast demand for accurate
identification of human in information technology and high
security applications such as attendance system, airport and
police station security. In order to identify individuals for these
applications, biometric identifiers are usually employed.
Biometric identifiers are based on somatic or behavioral
specifications methods such as face, finger prints, hand palm,
iris, voice, DNA and retina [1]. The biometric identifiers
require unique, measurable and repeatable features for every
individual to distinguish between people in the database. Along
with these features, retina may have provided higher level of
individuality and security duo to its aboriginal robustness
against impersonation.
The individuality in the retinal biometric system comes from
uniqueness of blood vessels’ pattern of the retina. Moreover,
the pattern of blood vessels in human retina experience less
modification during the life and it is deferent for each person
(even in identical twins). Hence, retinas’ blood vessel patterns
provide an acceptable differentiation between people and could
be an accurate biometric system.
For biometric identification, retina templates have been created
using image processing techniques on the raw and entire
images are matched based on correlation of the overall blood
978-1-4799-7418-4/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE
Hossein Pourghassem
Department of Electrical Engineering,
Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University,
Isfahan, Iran.
h_pourghasem@iaun.ac.ir
vessel pattern from the image. More often, feature extraction
techniques are employed to get useful information from entire
retinal images including detecting annulus centered of the optic
disk, circular region around the fovea and vessel pattern of the
retinal image. Due to the sensitivity of the OD and fovea
region to the brightness [2], intensity and exudates diesis,
recognition vessel in retinal images have been gained much
more attention recently.
Vessel extraction of retina image is a confronting research
issue [3]. The small contrast between vessels and background,
intensity of brightness, the thickness variability of the vessels
and presence of noise are the main matters have to be
addressed in vessel extraction techniques [4]. In the early
research, matched filters are employed to segment the blood
vessel and enhance the vascular structure from the background.
In [5, 6], snake tracking approaches are proposed to establish
the vascular structure. The nonlinear methods based on
frequency matched filter and morphological operations are
proposed in [7, 8]. The result of the blood vessel segmentation
is a binary image used to obtain vessel features.
Due to the classification task, the rich content of the retinal
templates is transform to the various features of the images.
There are two approach in extracting the features from the
retina images namely non-frequency and frequency domain. In
the non-frequency domain approach, the features are extracted
from the pixel of image in the spatial domain such as the
location of OD, energy, width and shape of the vessel. The
other approach in feature extraction is by means of non-
frequency domain where the features are extracted from 2D
Fourier of the image such as Curvelet, Wavlet and power
spectrum density. It is noted that the non-frequency approaches
usually suffer from rotation, edge detection and intensity of
brightness. However, the frequency domain features robust to
the rotation of the image because of the characteristics of the
Fourier transform. In [8], a non-frequency techniques based on
biometric graph matching (BGM) is introduced where the
graph of the vessel is obtained from crossovers and
bifurcations points of the vessel skeleton. However, it is a
complex procedure to compute the BGM’s graph registration
module automatically.
This paper introduces a human identity verification system
based on frequency analysis of retinal image. The paper is
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 21st Iranian Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICBME 2014), Biomedical Engineering Faculty, Amirkabir University of
Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran, Nov 26-28, 2014
formed as follow; in section 2, methodology of our algorithm
is presented. In section 3, retina features are extracted. In
section 4, comparison of proposed algorithm with some related
work has been done and finally section 5 presents the
conclusion and suggestion for some future studies.
II. PROPOSED ALGORITHM
This algorithm proposes an automatic retinal verification
frame-work to tessellate the vascular pattern of a retinal image
in Fourier domain. Figure 1 represents the proposed
verification framework of this study which includes 4 stages;
preprocessing, vessel segmentation, feature extraction and
similarity based identification stages. Pre-processing stage
removes back-ground and noise from retinal image to ensure
that the false features are not detected in the presence of noise.
Vessel segmentation stage extracts the blood vessel skeleton
from the background where the accuracy of proposed feature
extraction techniques depends on the precision of vessel
segmentation stage. Then, in the feature extraction stage, the
Fourier of vessel pattern is tessellated into the arcuate regions
to extract the feature vectors from each partition. Finally, the
similarity of feature vectors is evaluated by means of Euclidian
distance measure so that the performance of proposed
algorithm is obtained. The proposed feature extraction
approach is described in the detail in the following sections.
A. Pre-processing
The pre-processing stage has the task to enhance the vessels
and de-noising the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) fundus image
before the segmentation stage. RGB fundus image usually
involves with low contrast and noisy background. Hence, the
blood vessels, specially the thin ones, should be enhanced to
obtain the suitable modified image for the segmentation
process [9]. Because the result of the segmenting is a binary
image, usually the gray scale of the fundus image is employed.
The red and blue has low contrast and poor dynamic range
respectively and do not provide clear blood vessels of the
retina template. So, it is better to utilize the green channel as
the reference image in the retina identification system [10].
Median filter are frequently used for the noise removal process
of retina image. Contrast enhancement technique in [11] is
applied to the green component of the image. This approach is
based on top-hat morphological operations whereby top-hat by
opening and closing are applied to the brightness and dark
region of the green channel respectively. The subtraction of the
two results yielded a contrast-enhanced image. The
enhancement method is described mathematically in equation
(1) [12].
Input Vessels
Pre processing
image Segmentation
Similarity Tessellation Fourier
based base feature
transform
identification extraction
Result
Feature extraction
Figure1. Overview of the proposed identification framework.
stage the retina template is ready for the vessel segmentation
process.
B. Segmentation
Retina feature extraction depends on vascular pattern and their
features. So, it is crucial to segment the blood vessel
accurately. The goal of the segmentation step is to extract the
vessel skeletons from the retina template. In the proposed
retinal identification system, the vessel extraction module
contains of four basic steps including; 2D Gabor filtering,
thresholding, binarization, large and thin vessel extraction. In
the first step, in order to extract vessels, the real part of 2D
Gabor wavelet masks is correlated in four different orientations
of input images [13]. In thresholding and binerization steps, all
pixels of input images are recognized into vessel or non-vessel,
which are categorized in large vessel and thin vessel
segmentation separately. In large vessel extraction step, two
thresholds are chosen based on the structural properties of the
vessel components such as area to keep only large vessels,
minimum and maximum axis length of each vessel candidate
component and removes the vessel candidates with circularly
shapes. In final step, after subtracting large vessels from binary
image, linear Hough transform is used to extract thin vessel
candidates and fill the gaps on thin vessel candidates
simultaneously.
C. Tessellation-based Spectral Feature Extraction
In order to overcome the rotation sensitivity of the retina
identification system, secure and robust features have to be
addressed. For this purpose, feature extraction technique could
utilize the properties of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT)
such as symmetrical and circular data. This section develops
the proposed feature extraction technique in frequency domain.
a. Fourier Transform
I out I in  J TH I in   I TH I in  (1)
where, I in , I out , J TH and M TH are the input (green channel of
the retina image), output images, top-hat by opening and
closing of the input image respectively. After preprocessing
310
Two-dimensional Discrete Fourier Transform (2D-DFT) is a
mathematical transformation employed to convert the spatial
domain image into the fundamental frequency components
[14, 15]. DFT is used when the process needs to access the
geometric characteristics of a spatial domain image. Because
the image is decomposed to its sinusoidal components, it
 21st Iranian Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICBME 2014), Biomedical Engineering Faculty, Amirkabir University of
Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran, Nov 26-28, 2014

becomes easy to compare the images in the arcuate region of

the DFT. The 2D-DFT given by

1 M 1 N 1 uX vY
F (u, v) ¦ ¦ f ( X , Y ) e j 2 3 ( M  N ) (2)
MN X 0 Y 0
where F (u, v) is DFT of the retinal image f ( x, y ) and
M u N is the size of the image. The DFT can express in polar
instead of Cartesian form given by

F (u , v) | F (u, v) | e jM (u ,v ) (3) (a) (b)

Figure 2. (a) Blood vessels of retina image. (b) Fourrier transform
| F (u , v) | is the magnitude of the frequency spectrum and
M (u , v) is the phase of frequency spectrum which are b. BandPass Filter
calculated from
According to Fourier analyze, low frequency expresses main
part of information of root image and high frequency involve
| F (u , v) | R2 (u, v)  I 2 (u, v) (4) of noise, sharp variation and thin vessels. The thick vessels of
the retina template decomposed to low frequency components.
ª I (u, v) º As a result, high frequency in Fourier of retina image has less
M (u, v) tan 1 « » (5)
¬ R(u, v) ¼ information rather than low frequency. Moreover, in order to
reduce the effect of the brightness, the center of Fourier
spectrum should be removed. The ideal band pass filter H BP
where R (u , v) is the real part and I (u , v) is the imaginary part of
is illustrates passes only frequencies within the pass band and
retinal image in frequency domain. A blood vessel skeleton of
gives an output in the spatial domain that is in most cases
retina image in spatial domain and its DFT are depicted in
blurred and/or ringed. H BP can be derived mathematically by
Figure 2. Shining point at the center of the ordered image (b) is
the DC term of f ( x, y ) which represents the average brightness multiplying the transfer functions of a low pass filter H LP and
of the image. high pass filter H HP
Assume that f 2 ( x, y ) is a rotated and translated image of 1
H LP (u , v)
1  >D(u , v) / D L@ (9)
2n
f 1 ( x, y )
f 2 (x, y) f 1>x cosD  y sinD  x0 ,  x sinD  y cosD  y0@ (6) 1 (10)
H HP (u, v) 1  2n
1  [ D(u , v) / D H ]
where D is the rotation angle, x 0
and y0 are the
translational offsets. The Fourier transforms of f 1 ( x, y ) and H BP H LP (u , v )
H HP (u , v) (11)
f 2 ( x, y ) are yield
F2 (u, v) e jM(u,v) F1 >u cosD  v sinD , (u sinD  v cosD)@
\
(7)
where the spectral phase of image F 2 (u , v) is M (u , v) . The
value of the M (u , v) is changed with translation and rotation,
however, absolute value of equation (7) shows that the spectral
magnitude of F 2 (u , v) is translation invariant
| F 2 (u , v) | | F 1[(u cos D  v sin D ), (u sin D  v cos D ) | (8)
Equation (8) illustrates that a rotation of the image rotates the
spectral magnitude by the same angle but the value of spectrum
does not change. In other words, if f 0 (i, j ) is the feature
vector for an image I and I T is obtained by rotation of I with
angle T , the feature vector f T (i, j ) is related f 0 (i, j ) by the
expression that f n (i, j ) f 0 (i, j  T ) . Therefore, the feature
vector for a particular image will have circular shift
proportional to the rotation angle.
311
where DH and Dl are the cut off frequencies of the high and
low pass filters respectively; n is the order of the filter and
D (u , v) is the distance from the origin. An ideal band pass
filter is illustrated in Figure 3.It is observed that the ideal band
path filter has sharp transition from 0 to 1. Due to this
transition band, the edges remain fairly sharp and ringing
artifacts are created around the edges which is called Gibbs
phenomenon.
In order to reduce the effect of Gibbs phenomenon,
Butterworth filter is replaced with the ideal one. Figure 4
illustrates this fact that the transient band of the Butterworth
filter is smoothly change from 0 to 1. The contour map of the
Butterworth band pass filter is a set of concentric circle which
is depicted in Figure 5. It is observed that the number of
contours in the low frequency is much more than high
frequency. This observation is aligns with the fact that the root
information of the image exists in low frequency components.
The tessellation function of each concentric circle is given by
 21st Iranian Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICBME 2014), Biomedical Engineering Faculty, Amirkabir University of
Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran, Nov 26-28, 2014

Ri  {R1 , R 2 ,..., R N }
DH
Ri {(u, v) | (u , v)  Ri , ri  Ri  ri 1 } (12)

Ri r (u  u0 ) 2  (v  v0 ) 2 DL

i {1,2,..., N }
where Ri represents the radios of the ith concentric circle, u 0 and
v 0 is center of Fourier spectrum and N is the number of
circles.
c. Tessellation Scheme Figure 3. Ideal band pass filter
The formulation of the proposed tessellation technique comes
from the idea of concentric circles which is discussed in C-b.
The Fourier spectrum analysis of the retina image shows that
the density of useful information in retina image has reduced
from low to high frequency. Hence, employing a multi
resolution algorithm could be extracted information entirely. In
order to access the multi resolution tessellation, the radius of
the circles are calculated exponentially using
Ri Ri 1  E i (13)

where i {1,2,..., N } and E is a constant value. The sequence

of radiuses in equation (13) could tessellate the Fourier domain
into the concentric circles where the density of the circles is
high in the low frequency. Since DFT has the symmetry
Figure 4. Butterworth band pass filter
behavior, it could be yielded that | F (u , v) | F (u ,v) | . The
symmetry property indicates that | F (u , v) | is centered on the
origin and half of Fourier spectrum provides information as Rn
much as whole Fourier spectrum. Figure 6 represents the
modified tessellation area in Fourier transform. The mask in R3
Figure 6 is used to tessellate DFT of retina image to n sub-
band in the proposed feature extraction technique. R2
R1

III. FEATURE EXTRACTION

The Fourier transform of retina image is divided into n sub
band. Each sub band has exclusive properties which are used in
the proposed feature extraction method. Hereby, the energy of
each sub band e(i ) is defined as an element of feature vector.
Each image is specified by n sub band which make the size of Figure 5. Concentric circles of band pass filter
feature vector equals to 1 u n . In Fourier domain e(i ) is given
by
2 IV. SIMILARITY-BASED IDENTIFICATION
e(i ) ¦ | F (r i ,T )| (14)
In order to test the applicability of the feature extraction
where
technique, the existence of the input image in the data base has
R i d r i  R i 1 to be checked; system confirms or denies the existence of the
0 d T d 180 test image in the database. The similarity criteria which is used
i {1,2,..., n} in this stage is Euclidean distance given by
where i is number of sub band and T is phase of Fourier
transform of retina image which is chosen between 0 and 180. n n 2 (15)
Dis tan ce(a, b) ¦ ¦ (bi a j)
i 1j 0

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 21st Iranian Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICBME 2014), Biomedical Engineering Faculty, Amirkabir University of
Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran, Nov 26-28, 2014

where a and b are feature vectors of the train and test samples
respectively. If the distance between a test sample and train set
is larger than threshold, the system rejects the test sample. The
threshold is automatically calculated by
R
¦ emax i  emin i  (16)
Thereshold D(i 1
)
S
where D is a constant value, S is number of train sample, Figure 6. Half of concentric circles of band pass filter.
emax i and e min i is the energy of maximum and minimum sub-
band of each sample in training database, respectively. In the
Table I. Results of proposed algorithm for seven different experiments.
identification stage, distance between a test sample and train is
Accuracy %
calculated and label of test sample is equal to label of the lower Test Train
value of distance in database. Train Test
Experiment A 40 240 98.75 100

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Experiment B 40 240 99.58 100

In this section, results of the human identification based on the Experiment C 40 240 97.5 100
pattern of blood vessels in retina image is illustrated. The
Experiment D 40 240 99.1 100
method is also quite insensitive to translational and rotational
displacement. The proposed algorithm is enforced on the 40 Experiment E 40 240 97.08 97.5
sample from DRIVE database. Because of the limitation in Experiment F 40 240 97.5 100
number of samples in DRIVE data base, each of the samples is Experiment G 40 240 100 97.5
rotated six times with r5,r10,r15 degrees to achieve 280
Mean 98.5 99.29
samples in order to test the robustness of the proposed
technique in the presence of translational and rotational
displacement. The accuracy of the proposed identification
system is tested in seven different experiments. For each
experiment the sets of train and test are change in order to
achieve uncorrelated results. The results of the proposed
method for 7 different experiments with D 2 , E 2 and
initial radius R0 5 are provided in table 1. It is observed that
the identification method has an average accuracy equal to
99.29%. The accuracy can be determined by the ratio of the
total number correctly identified sample to the total number of
sample in equation (17) where true accept (TA) refers to
sample correctly labeled and false accept (FA) refers to sample
incorrectly labeled as acceptable. False reject (FR) refers to
positive sample incorrectly labeled as reject. Finally, True Figure 7. True accept versus false reject for results of proposed algorithm.
reject (TR) refers to negative sample correctly labeled as reject.
TA
accuracy (17) Table II. Identification results with different value of D
TA  TR  FA  FR
D E FR Accuracy%
In order to evaluate the performance of identification system,
number of true accepts samples are compared with the number 1.5 2 3 92.5
of false reject samples. Figure 7 shows the variation of true 2 2 1 97.5
2.5 2 0 100
accepts (TA) and false accepts (FA) when the value of D is 3 2 0 100
change. It is observed that the value of false reject and true
accept are equal to 0 and 40 respectively when D 2.5 . If D is The other factor which has impact on the accuracy of the
more than 2.5, all the samples are identified (TA=40) which is identification is the number of circle used for the tessellation.
depicted in table II. However, D is proposition to value of the Table III shows accuracy of proposed algorithm with different
threshold which cannot be chosen a very large scale. If the value of R where D 2.5 . The set of R is created by the
threshold is not chosen properly, the test samples out of data exponential approach in equation (13). It is observed that by
base also can be identified in the system as a correct sample. increasing the number of tessellation the accuracy increases
As a result, choosing an optimum D is important issue and has until R 37 . By increasing the value of R more than 37, the
a direct effect on the accuracy of the proposed method. accuracy experiences a downward trend. The inaccuracy in a

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 21st Iranian Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICBME 2014), Biomedical Engineering Faculty, Amirkabir University of
Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran, Nov 26-28, 2014
large number of tessellation occurs because the energies
calculated by equation (14) have approximately same values
when the tessellation parts are too close to each other.
Table III. Identification results with different value of
R Accuracy%
8 90
12 98.75
34 99.58
37 100
43 99.58
58 99.17
75 96.67
88 94.58
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In this paper, a new scheme for the retinal image feature
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R
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