SEGMENTATION OF RETINAL BLOOD VESSELS BASED ON ANALYSIS OF THEHESSIAN MATRIX AND CLUSTERING ALGORITHM

摘要

In this paper, a novel unsupervised method to segment retinalrnblood vessels from colour fundus images is proposed. A newrnvesselness measure is introduced which is based on detectingrnvessel centerlines and orientation in scale space. Basedrnon this vesselness measure a generated ground truth (GGT)rnimage is obtained by thresholding and removing segments ofrnsmall sizes. The segmentation is obtained by using this GGTrnimage in conjunction with a RAdius-based Clustering Algorithmrn(RACAL). A dataset of 20 images publicly available isrnused to evaluate the performance of our proposed method.rnExperimental results show that a true positive rate (TPR) ofrn81% at false positive rate (FPR) of 4.5% is achieved comparedrnwith TPR of 76% at the same FPR from the piecewisernthreshold probing method [1].