Extracting the autonomic nerve wreath of iris based on an improved snake approach

The autonomic nerve wreath (ANW) is a major landmark feature of iris topography in iridology. Finding the edge of the ANW is of great importance to an automated iris diagnosis system. Based on a two-phase greedy optimization approach, this paper presents an improved snake model for extracting the edge of ANW, which solves the problem that the traditional snake initial contour should be close to the true boundary of interested object in an image. Experimental results show the validity of this approach.