LOCALIZATION OF EYE AND CORNEA ON IR THERMOGRAM USING GENETIC SNAKE FOR EARLY DETECTION OF EYE DISEASE

Temperature has been used to diagnose human's health since 400 B.C. where Hippocrates reported disease is to be found whichever part of human body is in excess heat or cold. This idea is still widely applied nowadays and the advance in infrared thermography technology is furthering the idea into more sophisticated diagnosis techniques, such as detection of breast cancer. Detection of ocular disease may be another field where IR thermography can play an important role in, however, such approach is yet to be established and several issues in the approach are yet to be solved. First among the all is localization of eye and more importantly, cornea, since temperature and its variation across cornea are the keys in identification of ocular health status. Until recently, localizing of cornea on studies of eye thermogram is still achieved through manual effort. Unlike optical image, eyes in infrared thermogram does not possess clear boundary in between iris and sclera (usually it is assumed the cornea sits perfectly just on top of iris), and this has brought difficulties in corneal segmentation from the rest of image. In most cases, researches approach to this problem is by estimating the centre of cornea and setup either a shape (a square, a circle, and etc) or a series of points based on the estimated centre to acquire thermal values of interest. The ways to obtain corneal temperature on an infrared thermogram are vaguely defined and vary among different literature.