an occular image of a region including meibomian glands is processed automatically . the processing may derive a grade indicative of the health of the meibomian glands , by using in the occular image to obtain one or more numerical parameters characterizing the meibomian glands shown in the occular image , and determining the grade using the one or more numerical parameters . the numerical parameters include a parameter characterizing the diversity between scale parameters of significant features of the image obtained by a scale - space transform , and / or parameters obtained by measurement of lines in the occular image representing respective glands . meibomian glands can be identified on ocular images using gabor filtering as a local filtering technique . the parametrization in shape , local spatial support , and orientation of gabor filtering is particularly suitable for detecting meibomian glands .