Enhancement of blood vessels in retinal imaging using the nonsubsampled contourlet transform

This paper presents an enhancement method for blood vessels in retinal images based on the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). The NSCT is a shift-invariant version of the contourlet transform built upon the nonsubsampled pyramid filter banks and the nonsubsampled directional filter banks. The proposed method uses the NSCT to decompose the input retinal image into eight directions from coarser to finer scales, and then analyzes and classifies the image pixels into three categories: vessel, uncertainty, and non-vessel pixels, according to the NSCT coefficients. Then, we modify the NSCT coefficients according to the class of each pixel using a nonlinear mapping function, and reconstruct the enhanced image from the modified NSCT coefficients. The experimental results show that the proposed method can obviously increase the contrast of retinal vessels and thus outperform other enhancement methods.

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