AUTO-SEGMENTATION OF RETINAL BLOOD VESSELS USING IMAGE

PROCESSING

Abstract

Automatic segmentation of the normal features such the blood vessels may help
to develop the future of medicine. It can give an earlier diagnosis of such eye
diseases as diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma; it can support the specialists in their
decision as well. In this paper, a method of retinal blood vessel segmentation is
proposed. The database used is HRF of a total of 45 fundus images. The fundus
images go through a MATLAB code in preprocessing steps of image acquisition,
grayscale conversion and contrast enhancement, intensity adjustment, complement
and adaptive histogram equalization. Then, the blood vessel segmentation process
includes mathematical morphological opening, binarization and noise extraction.
The proposed method shows a specificity of 97%, a sensitivity of 69% and an
Accuracy of 94%. KeywordsSegmentation; Retinal Blood Vessels; Image
Processing; HRF database