Blood vessel segmentation from retinal images based on enhencement methods

Abstract

Usage of Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems is increasing rapidly. Blood vessel segmentation on retinal fundus images could be used as a CAD system for diagnosis of various retinal diseases. In this paper, blood vessels are segmented on retinal fundus images. Firstly, Gabor filter and morphological top-hat transform are applied after preprocessing step in order to enhance blood vessels. Afterward, we performed p-tile thresholding method to obtain binary vessel image. At the last step a post processing method is applied to increase accuracy. In order to test the developed system, the images obtained from STARE and DRIVE databases are used. Finally, 94.02% of accuracy for STARE database and 94.59% of accuracy for DRIVE database are obtained as a result, which is promising.