Retinal blood vessel extraction method based on basic filtering schemes

The eye disease such as Diabetic Retinopathy(DR) can be analysed through segmentation of retinal blood vessels. In the last five years, many methods for retinal blood vessels segmentation were proposed. These methods give arise to the improved accuracy, however the sensitivity of low contrast vessels is often ignored. The performance of diagnosis in terms of segmentation of vessels can be degraded due to missing tiny vessels. In this study, we propose a novel algorithm aiming at improving the performance of segmenting small vessels. The proposed approach adopts a morphological and filtering method to handle the background noise and uneven illumination and uses anisotropic diffusion filtering to coherent the vessels and give initial detection of vessels, followed by a double threshold based region growing method.

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