Gabor wavelet based vessel segmentation in retinal images

Retinal image vessel segmentation and their branching pattern are used for automated screening and diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. Vascular pattern is normally not visible in retinal images. We present a method that uses 2-D Gabor wavelet and sharpening filter to enhance and sharpen the vascular pattern respectively. Our technique extracts the vessels from sharpened retinal image using edge detection algorithm and applies morphological operation for their refinement. This technique is tested on publicly available DRIVE database of manually labeled images. The validation of our retinal image vessel segmentation technique is supported by experimental results.

[1]  T. Teng,et al.  Progress towards automated diabetic ocular screening: A review of image analysis and intelligent systems for diabetic retinopathy , 2006, Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing.

[2]  C. Sinthanayothin,et al.  Automated localisation of the optic disc, fovea, and retinal blood vessels from digital colour fundus images , 1999, The British journal of ophthalmology.

[3]  A Hoover,et al.  Locating blood vessels in retinal images by piece-wise threshold probing of a matched filter response , 1998, AMIA.

[4]  Liang Zhou,et al.  The detection and quantification of retinopathy using digital angiograms , 1994, IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging.

[5]  Demetri Terzopoulos,et al.  T-snakes: Topology adaptive snakes , 2000, Medical Image Anal..

[6]  O. Chutatape,et al.  Retinal blood vessel detection and tracking by matched Gaussian and Kalman filters , 1998, Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Vol.20 Biomedical Engineering Towards the Year 2000 and Beyond (Cat. No.98CH36286).

[7]  Anthony J. Yezzi,et al.  Vessel Segmentation Using a Shape Driven Flow , 2004, MICCAI.

[8]  Roberto Marcondes Cesar Junior,et al.  Retinal vessel segmentation using the 2-D Gabor wavelet and supervised classification , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[9]  Yannis A. Tolias,et al.  A fuzzy vessel tracking algorithm for retinal images based on fuzzy clustering , 1998, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[10]  S. L. Eddins,et al.  Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB: AND Mathworks, MATLAB Sim SV 07 , 2007 .

[11]  A.D. Hoover,et al.  Locating blood vessels in retinal images by piecewise threshold probing of a matched filter response , 2000, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[12]  Enrico Grisan,et al.  Detection of optic disc in retinal images by means of a geometrical model of vessel structure , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[13]  Marc Lalondey,et al.  Non-recursive paired tracking for vessel extraction from retinal images , 2000 .

[14]  Jean-Pierre Antoine,et al.  Image analysis with two-dimensional continuous wavelet transform , 1993, Signal Process..

[15]  A. Pinz,et al.  Mapping the human retina , 1996, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[16]  A. Arneodo,et al.  A wavelet-based method for multifractal image analysis. I. Methodology and test applications on isotropic and anisotropic random rough surfaces , 2000 .

[17]  K. M. West,et al.  A Detailed Study of Risk Factors for Retinopathy and Nephropathy in Diabetes , 1980, Diabetes.

[18]  Jordi Vitrià,et al.  Tracking elongated structures using statistical snakes , 2000, Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2000 (Cat. No.PR00662).

[19]  M. Goldbaum,et al.  Detection of blood vessels in retinal images using two-dimensional matched filters. , 1989, IEEE transactions on medical imaging.

[20]  Hong Shen,et al.  Rapid automated tracing and feature extraction from retinal fundus images using direct exploratory algorithms , 1999, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[21]  Keith A. Soper,et al.  Diagnosis of diabetic eye disease. , 1982, JAMA.

[22]  Ana Maria Mendonça,et al.  Segmentation of retinal blood vessels by combining the detection of centerlines and morphological reconstruction , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[23]  Rafael C. González,et al.  Digital image processing using MATLAB , 2006 .

[24]  Huiqi Li,et al.  Automated feature extraction in color retinal images by a model based approach , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[25]  Max A. Viergever,et al.  Ridge-based vessel segmentation in color images of the retina , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[26]  Kaleem Siddiqi,et al.  Flux maximizing geometric flows , 2001, Proceedings Eighth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. ICCV 2001.

[27]  Ying Sun,et al.  Recursive tracking of vascular networks in angiograms based on the detection-deletion scheme , 1993, IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging.

[28]  Chia-Ling Tsai,et al.  Model-based method for improving the accuracy and repeatability of estimating vascular bifurcations and crossovers from retinal fundus images , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.