A Dual Step Strategy for Retinal Thin Vessel Enhancement/Extraction

摘要

Blood vessel extraction from retinal images is a challenging and fundamental step in pathological analysis. Most of the vessel extraction algorithms face difficulty in the extraction of thin vessels. In this paper, a dual step strategy for retinal thin vessel enhancement/extraction is proposed. Since thin vessel pixels have intensities closer to the background non-vessel pixels, the first level enhancement algorithms usually suffers in its accurate extraction. This led to explore a novel idea of eliminating the effects of thick vessel pixels in a reference image, via replacing it with neighboring non-vessel pixels. By applying second level enhancement on the vessel subtracted image, thin vessels are projected and improvement in extraction is attained subjectively as well as objectively.