Unsupervised delineation of the vessel tree in retinal fundus images

N. Strisciuglio, M. Vento, G. Azzopardi, N. Petkov

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

19 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Retinal imaging has gained particular popularity as it provides an opportunity to diagnose various medical pathologies in a non-invasive way. One of the basic and very important steps in the analysis of such images is the delineation of the vessel tree from the background. Such segmentation facilitates the investigation of the morphological characteristics of the vessel tree and the analysis of any lesions in the background, which are both indicators for various pathologies. We propose a novel method called B-COSFIRE for the delineation of the vessel tree. It is based on the classic COSFIRE approach, which is a trainable nonlinear filtering method. RE filter to be configured by the automatic analysis of any given vessel-like pattern. The responses of a B-COSFIRE filter is achieved by combining the responses of difference-of-Gaussians filters whose areas of support are determined in an automatic configuration step. We configure two types of B-COSFIRE filters, one that responds selectively along vessels and another that is selective to vessel endings. The segmentation of the vessel tree is achieved by summing up the response maps of both types of filters followed by thresholding. We demonstrate high effectiveness of the proposed approach by performing experiments on four public data sets, namely DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1 and HRF. The delineation approach that we propose also has lower time complexity than existing methods.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputational Vision and Medical Image Processing V
Subtitle of host publicationComputational Vision and Medical Image Processing V - Proceedings of 5th Eccomas Thematic Proceedings of the 5th Eccomas Thematic Conference on Computational Vision and Medical Image Processing
EditorsJoao Manuel R.S. Tavares, R.M. Natal Jorge
PublisherCRC Press/Balkema
Pages149-156
Number of pages8
Edition1
ISBN (Print)9781138029262
Publication statusPublished - 14 Oct 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event5th Eccomas Thematic Conference on Computational Vision and Medical Image Processing, VipIMAGE 2015 - Tenerife, Spain
Duration: 19 Oct 201521 Oct 2015
Conference number: 5

Conference

Conference5th Eccomas Thematic Conference on Computational Vision and Medical Image Processing, VipIMAGE 2015
Abbreviated titleVipIMAGE 2015
Country/TerritorySpain
CityTenerife
Period19/10/1521/10/15

Keywords

  • Delineation
  • Retinal image analysis
  • Trainable filters
  • Vessel segmentation

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