  This paper presents a method for retinal vasculature extraction based on
biologically inspired multi-orientation analysis. We apply multi-orientation
analysis via so-called invertible orientation scores, modeling the cortical
columns in the visual system of higher mammals. This allows us to generically
deal with many hitherto complex problems inherent to vessel tracking, such as
crossings, bifurcations, parallel vessels, vessels of varying widths and
vessels with high curvature. Our approach applies tracking in invertible
orientation scores via a novel geometrical principle for curve optimization in
the Euclidean motion group SE(2). The method runs fully automatically and
provides a detailed model of the retinal vasculature, which is crucial as a
sound basis for further quantitative analysis of the retina, especially in
screening applications.
