Pixel parallel vessel tree extraction for a personal authentication system

Biometric features have been studied in order to be applied to authentication and identification systems due to its reliability. Among others, the retinal vessel tree have been proposed as a vessel pattern for personal authentication applications, since it is almost impossible to forge. In this kind of systems, the retinal vessel tree is computed from the retinal image, and then a registration process is made. Although reliable and remarkable results have been obtained in this vessel pattern-based system, the required computation effort is quite high, particularly to compute and extract the vessel tree. In this paper, a pixel parallel approach is proposed to tackle with the retinal vessel tree extraction to be used in a personal retinal authentication system, regarding the computation speed.