Automatic Detection of Blood Vessel in Retinal Images Using Vesselness Enhancement Filter and Adaptive Thresholding

Abstract

Retinal blood vessels detection and measurement of morphological attributes, such as length, width, sinuosity and corners are very much important for the diagnosis and treatment of different ocular diseases including diabetic retinopathy (DR), glaucoma, and hypertension. This paper presents a integration method for blood vessels detection in fundus retinal images. The proposed method consists of two main steps. The first step is pre-processing of retinal image to improve the retinal images by evaluation of several image enhancement techniques. The second step is vessels detection, the vesselness filter is usually used to enhance the blood vessels. The enhancement filter is designed from the adaptive thresholding of the output of the vesselness filter for vessels detection. The algorithms performance is compared and analyzed on three publicly available databases (DRIVE, STARE and CHASE_DB) of retinal images using a number of measures, which include accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.