Zou BJ, Chen Y, Zhu CZ et al. Supervised vessels classification based on feature selection.

JOURNAL OF COMPUTER
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 32(6): 1222–1230 Nov. 2017. DOI 10.1007/s11390-017-1796-x

Supervised Vessels Classification Based on Feature Selection

Bei-Ji Zou1,2 , Member, CCF, Yao Chen1,2 , Cheng-Zhang Zhu2,3,∗ , Member, CCF
Zai-Liang Chen1,2 , Member, CCF, and Zi-Qian Zhang1,2

1
School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
2
“Mobile Health” Ministry of Education-China Mobile Joint Laboratory, Central South University
Changsha 410083, China
3
College of Literature and Journalism, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China

E-mail: bjzou@csu.edu.cn; ychencs@whu.edu.cn; anandawork@126.com; xxxyczl@csu.edu.cn; 450867607@qq.com

Received June 20, 2017; revised September 25, 2017.

Abstract Arterial-venous classification of retinal blood vessels is important for the automatic detection of cardiovascular
diseases such as hypertensive retinopathy and stroke. In this paper, we propose an arterial-venous classification (AVC)
method, which focuses on feature extraction and selection from vessel centerline pixels. The vessel centerline is extracted
after the preprocessing of vessel segmentation and optic disc (OD) localization. Then, a region of interest (ROI) is extracted
around OD, and the most efficient features of each centerline pixel in ROI are selected from the local features, grey-level
co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) features, and an adaptive local binary patten (A-LBP) feature by using a max-relevance and
min-redundancy (mRMR) scheme. Finally, a feature-weighted K-nearest neighbor (FW-KNN) algorithm is used to classify
the arterial-venous vessels. The experimental results on the DRIVE database and INSPIRE-AVR database achieve the high
accuracy of 88.65% and 88.51% in ROI, respectively.

Keywords fundus image, arterial-venous classification, adaptive local binary patten (A-LBP), feature selection, feature-
weighted K-nearest neighbor (FW-KNN)

1 Introduction more apparent central reflection than veins[3] . Fig.1

shows an example of arteries and veins. For this rea-
Retina is the only part of the human body where son, classifying the vessels into arteries and veins is pos-
vascular structure is observable in vivo through a sim- sible. And these visual and geometrical features have
ple technology[1] . The attributes of vascular structure been used in many arterial-venous classification meth-
such as width, tortuosity, branching pattern and an- ods.
gles are useful for early diagnosis of diseases such as
diabetic retinopathy and hypertensive retinopathy, be-
cause most of these diseases result in changes of vas- Vein
cular structure[2] . The arterial to venous width ratio
(AVR) is an important indicator reflecting these small
changes. For the calculation of AVR, we need to classify
the vessels into arteries and veins.
There are visual and geometrical features that can Artery
be used for arterial-venous classification. Arteries are
brighter while veins are darker, and in general artery
calibers are smaller than vein calibers. Arteries have Fig.1. Example of arteries and veins.

Regular Paper
Special Section of CAD/Graphics 2017
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61573380, 61702559, 61562029.
∗ Corresponding Author

©2017 Springer Science + Business Media, LLC & Science Press, China
Bei-Ji Zou et al.: Supervised Vessels Classification Based on Feature Selection
The existing arterial-venous classification methods
are either completely automatic or semi-automatic.
The semi-automatic methods require ophthalmologists
to mark the initial point of the trunk blood vessel as
an artery or a vein in the retinal image, and then it au-
tomatically classifies the remaining vessels, according
to the connectivity of vessels. The automatic meth-
ods are based on various characteristics of artery and
vein blood vessels and apply machine learning or other
methods to automatically label the vessels as arteries
or veins.
There are several samples of semi-automatic meth-
ods. Hubbard et al.[3-4] first proposed a semi-automatic
method for the calculation of vessel calibers, and suc-
cessfully applied it to community atherosclerosis re-
search. Aguilar et al.[5] achieved semi-automatic classi-
fication based on the analysis of vascular network struc-
ture, subtrees of geometric, and topological properties.
Rothaus et al.[6] considered the characteristics of cross-
over and bifurcation points and the non-closed-loop
characteristics of vessels. Then they combined them
with a vessel segmentation and tracking algorithm and
finally achieved vessel classification. Semi-automatic
methods are time-consuming and laborious for handling
a large number of retinal fundus images. The automatic
methods perform well on the problem.
The automatic classification methods have the ad-
vantages of saving manpower and material resources,
and also achieve the automatic screening of cardiovas-
cular diseases, which is paid more and more attention
by researchers now. Grisan and Ruggeri[2] first pro-
posed an automated method of arterial-venous classi-
fication. They considered the existence of brightness
and color differences between one fundus image and
others, and took into account that the differences be-
tween arteries and veins were reduced from the optic
disc (OD) to extended region in fundus images. And
the vessels inside optic disc are hard to track; therefore
they chose an ROI. They divided the ROI into four
quadrants and the classification processes are carried
out independently within the four quadrants.
Niemeijer et al.[1,7] also applied a supervised learn-
ing method to automatically identify vascular type.
Dashtbozorg et al.[8] used a graph-based approach for
arterial-venous classification. Estrada et al.[9] proposed
a hierarchical edge marker program based on topology
estimation and finally obtained the results of arterial-
venous classification. Relan et al.[10] proposed a novel
○
1
http://www.varpa.es/research/ophtalmology.html#databases, Nov. 2017.
1223
method called Squared-Loss Mutual Information Clus-
tering (SMIC) for classifying arteries and veins in reti-
nal images, which achieved 87.6% and 86.2% classifica-
tion rates on the INSPIRE-AVR dataset[7] and DRIVE
dataset[11] respectively. Vijayakumar et al.[12] used ran-
dom forest to select features extracted from vessels, and
then chose the features that contribute most to the clas-
sification as inputs to the polynomial kernel support
vector machine (SVM) classifier. This method achieves
92.4% of accuracy on the VICAVR database○ 1
.
Though the accuracy is not better than that of semi-
automatic classification methods, the advantage of au-
tomatic classification methods is their speed. A rapid
and accurate classification method can help improve
diagnostic efficiency for batch treatment of retinal im-
ages. Therefore, we focus on automatic methods in this
paper.
In this paper, a new feature-selected method for
arterial-venous classification is proposed. Firstly, we
collect various features that have effect on the final clas-
sification value. Secondly, a feature selection algorithm
is applied, which can eliminate those features that con-
tribute negatively to classification accuracy. Lastly, we
take three strategies for vessel classification: no feature
selection, feature selection, and feature weighting by
our feature-weighted K-nearest neighbor (FW-KNN)
algorithm.
As a short summary, the major contributions of our
work are summarized as below.
1) We propose an arterial-venous classification
(AVC) method for vessel classification based on feature
selection.
2) To the best of our knowledge, we collect various
features including local features and an adaptive local
binary patten (A-LBP) feature to represent a retinal
image.
3) To get the best performance of classification, we
propose FW-KNN to apply for arterial-venous classifi-
cation.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
The proposed method is explained in Section 2. In Sec-
tion 3 we describe our experimental results of arterial-
venous classification and compare the results of our pro-
posed method and existing methods on DRIVE and
INSPIRE-AVR, respectively.
1224
2 Proposed Method
Some preprocessing techniques are applied to get
vessel centerline pixels after acquisition of fundus im-
ages. Then vascular features are extracted from center-
line pixels, and a machine learning algorithm is applied
for arterial-venous classification.
2.1 Materials
The DRIVE database[12] , INSPIRE-AVR
[7] ○
database , and VICAVR database 2 are public
databases that can be used for arterial-venous classifi-
cation. In our proposed method, we choose INSPIRE-
AVR database and DRIVE database. The images in
the DRIVE database are randomly selected from a
DR (diabetic retinopathy) screening program in the
Netherlands, and manual segmentation of the vascu-
lature is available. Arterial-venous ground truth for
the DRIVE dataset (20 test images) is obtained by an
expert who manually labeled the vessel centerline seg-
ments in each image[8] . The 40 high-resolution images
in the INSPIRE-AVR database have the resolution of
2 392×2 048 pixels and are optic disc-centered.
2.2 Preprocessing
2.2.1 Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Vessel segmentation is aimed at extracting the vessel
centerline. The vessel segmentation method proposed
by Zhu et al.[13] is a supervised method which is used
for segmenting retinal vessels. This method follows a
pixel-wise approach based on extreme learning machine
(ELM) with three phases. The first phase is the feature
extraction process. Local features, morphological fea-
tures, phase congruency, and Hessian and divergence of
vector fields are extracted from each pixel of the image.
In the second phase, training and testing are done using
ELM. Then we get the preliminary vessel segmentation
result, where there are some no-vessel regions. The
third phase is optimization processing. In this phase,
the region where the area less than 20 pixels is removed.
Fig.2(a) shows the result of vessel segmentation.
2.2.2 Optic Disc Localization
Optic disk (OD) localization is necessary for deter-
mining the ROI for arterial-venous classification. The
vessels on OD are not relevant for the arterial-venous
classification process. And the differences of vessels be-
tween outside OD and inside OD are reduced, which
○
2
http://www.varpa.es/research/ophtalmology.html#databases, Nov. 2017.
J. Comput. Sci. & Technol., Nov. 2017, Vol.32, No.6
results in a high error rate for classification. Thus,
we choose an annular region of 0.5∼1.5 disc diameters
away from the OD center as ROI. The OD location is
based on a morphological operation, a circular Hough
transform, and a grow-cut algorithm[14] . We apply the
Hough transform to get the OD center, and get the
OD boundary by employing the grow-cut algorithm.
Fig.2(b) shows the result of OD localization.
(a) (b) (c)
Fig.2. Example of preprocessing. (a) Vessel segmentation. (b)
Optic disc localization. (c) Vessel centerline extraction.
2.2.3 Vessel Centerline Extraction
An improved augmented fast marching method
(AFMM)[15] is applied to centerline extraction. AFMM
is widely used in skeleton extraction by computing the
parameterized boundary location of each pixel. More
details can be found in [15]. In this step, we also com-
pute the local radius at each centerline point. The lo-
cal radius is the maximum radius that includes only
the vessel pixels. We choose pixels whose local radiuses
are greater than a threshold. It aims at getting a more
accurate result, and does not affect the calculation of
AVR. After centerline extraction, cross-over and bifur-
cation points are removed for obtaining independent
vessel segments, because these pixels will affect the ef-
fect of training. Fig.2(c) shows the result of vessel cen-
terline extraction.
2.3 Feature Extraction
Feature extraction is one of the most important
steps of ACV. A normalized operation and a contrast
enhancement operation are applied on the retinal im-
ages separately for better feature extraction. In order to
obtain normalized images, we estimate the luminosity
and contrast variability in the background part of the
image and the subsequent compensation of this variabi-
lity in the whole image[16] . For obtaining enhanced con-
trast images, an iterative algorithm is performed, which
aims to remove the strong contrast between the retinal
fundus and the region outside the camera’s aperture[17] .
Bei-Ji Zou et al.: Supervised Vessels Classification Based on Feature Selection
Then a Gaussian filter is applied to obtain the enhanced
contrast images. Fig.3 illustrates the results of above
two processes.
(a) (b) (c)
Fig.3. Example of original and processed images. (a) Original
image. (b) Image processed by normalized procedure. (c) Image
processed by enhanced contrast procedure.
Features which are used to differentiate arteries
from veins, are usually based on intensity and geometri-
cal features. A collection of pixel intensity features, and
GLCM (grey-level co-occurrence matrix) features, and
an A-LPB feature is used to generate an 80-dimension
feature vector for each centerline pixel.
2.3.1 Local Features
The arteries are oxygen-rich and the veins carry a
large amount of metabolites in human body[2] . This
leads to differences in the color of artery and vein blood
vessels. Therefore, the intensity of the vein vessel pixels
shows darker than that of the artery vessel. Also artery
velocities are faster than vein velocities. It causes the
width of arteries around the optic disc smaller than that
of veins. Based on these characteristics, a large num-
ber of color-related features are extracted on different
channels of different color spaces. The L, A, B color
space describes mathematically all perceivable colors
in the three dimensions, L for lightness, and A and B
for the color opponents green-red and blue-yellow re-
spectively. Besides, the green channel of the original
image is presented separately, and is filtered with diffe-
rent scale Gaussian kernel functions. The response val-
ues are recorded as features.
2.3.2 Grey-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix Features
Arteries and veins also have differences in texture.
Therefore the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM),
which is a statistical method of examining texture fea-
ture of an image, is applied in our method. The method
calculates how often the pairs of pixels with specific val-
ues and in a specified spatial relationship occur in an
image. We create a GLCM, and then extract statistics
1225
from this matrix. In order to describe the texture fea-
tures intuitively in GLCM, some parameters are derived
from the matrix as Table 1 illustrates.
Table 1. Parameters Extracted from GLCM
Designation Function
Contrast Measuring the local variations in the gray-level
co-occurrence matrix
Energy Providing the sum of squared elements in the
GLCM; also known as uniformity or the angu-
lar second moment
Homogeneity Measuring the closeness of the distribution of
elements in the GLCM to that of the GLCM
diagonal
In this paper, the local images of the 25-pixel region
are extracted and at the center of those local images are
vessel centerline pixels. Then we create GLCMs, and
calculate contrast, energy and homogeneity separately
as feature values.
2.3.3 Adaptive Local Binary Pattern Feature
The central reflex is more apparent in arteries than
in veins due to the difference of absorbing lights. And
we propose an A-LBP (adaptive local binary pattern
feature) operator to describe this feature. Local bi-
nary pattern (LBP) is an operator that describes the
local texture features of an image. Under normal cir-
cumstances, this operator covers an area within a fixed
radius. For example, we compare the intensity values
of the central pixel and its 8-neighborhood. If the value
of each neighborhood pixel is greater than that of the
central pixel, we assign 1 to the corresponding neigh-
bor position in LBP operator; otherwise, we assign 0
to this position. Then, we transform the LBP operator
into a binary series in clockwise or counter-clockwise
direction. After that, we convert the binary series to a
decimal number.
In this paper, we change the LBP operator’s radius
to be variable. Fig.4 is a part of a gray image and
its intensity value. The black numbers represent the
background while the red ones represent vessels. And
the blue number indicates an example of the centerline
pixels. We have calculated the local radius of center-
line pixels in Subsection 2.2.3 and the local radius in
this centerline pixel is 2. We set this local radius as
our A-LPB radius. This means we compare the values
of the central point and the neighbor points which are
two pixels away from the center. If the value of each
neighborhood point is greater than that of the central
point, we assign 1 to the corresponding neighbor po-
sition in LBP operator; otherwise, we assign 0 to the
1226
Fig.4. Example of a gray image and its intensity value. The black numbers represent the background while the red ones represent
vessels. The blue number indicates one of the centerline pixels. The bold and underlined numbers show an example of our adaptive
LBP windows.
position. Because the values in A-LBP are arranged
along a circle, if we choose different values as origin
values, we get different binary sequences. Then we con-
vert these sequences into decimal numbers, and choose
the smallest decimal value as our A-LBP feature value.
The bold and underlined numbers show the border of
A-LBP windows in Fig.4 (for the unity of the A-LPB
values, we take eight sampling points).
Finally, a set of 80 features are extracted. Table 2
shows the list of extracted features. All features are
normalized.
2.4 Feature Selection
Feature selection is not only a method of reducing
dimension, but also a method to improve the perfor-
mance of the classifier. First of all, the mutual informa-
tion between two random variables x and y is defined in
terms of their probabilistic density functions p(x), p(y),
and p(x, y).
ZZ
p(x, y)
I(x; y) = p(x, y) log( ) dx dy.
p(x)p(y)
The minimal-redundancy maximal-relevance
(mRMR)[18] tends to select features with a high cor-
relation with the class (output) and a low correlation
between themselves. Namely, it is to find m features
from a feature set S, which have the largest relevance
and smallest redundancy on the target class c.
Step 1: Max-Relevance. Max-relevance is to search
features satisfying (1).
1 X
max D(S, c), D = I(xi ; c). (1)
|S|
xi ∈S
But the selected features may have rich redundancy
which means the dependency among these features
J. Comput. Sci. & Technol., Nov. 2017, Vol.32, No.6
could be large. If two features that are highly depen-
dent, one of them can be removed, and then the class-
discriminative power would not change much. There-
fore, the next step is to remove redundancy features.
Step 2: Min-Redundancy. Min-redundancy means
to select mutually exclusive features.
1 X
min R(S), R(S) = I(xi ; xj ). (2)
|S|2
xi ,xj ∈S
Combining (1) and (2), we get a criterion for feature
selection:
max Φ(D, R), Φ(D, R) = D − R.
The combination of max-relevance and min-
redundancy criteria, which we call mRMR, is proved
credible and leads to promising improvement on fea-
ture selection and classification accuracy[18]. Consider
the feature set F = {f1 , f2 , · · · , fM } where there are
M features (as mentioned in Subsection 2.3, a set of 80
features is extracted, and thus M = 80 in this paper)
per centerline point, and the decision class is −1 for
arteries and 1 for veins. Then, we calculate mutual in-
formation between features, or features and class, and
use mRMR criteria for features’ score. The final set
W = {λ1 , λ2 , · · · , λM } is the set of feature importance
scores for every feature in the dataset. The features
with the best scores are known to contribute the most
to classification.
2.5 Arterial-Venous Classification
K-nearest neighbor (KNN) is faster than some clas-
sifiers like random forest and usually has a higher ac-
curacy. In this paper, we proposed a feature-weighted
KNN (FW-KNN) algorithm. An example is used to
Bei-Ji Zou et al.: Supervised Vessels Classification Based on Feature Selection 1227

Table 2. Feature Vector of Each Pixel

Dimension Feature No. Feature Description
Based on original 1∼3 Red, green, and blue intensities of the centerline pixels
images (51) 4∼6 Hue (H), saturation (S), and intensity (I) of the centerline pixels
7∼14 Intensity of the centerline pixel in a Gaussian blurred (σ = 2, 4, 8, 16) of red and green plane
15 Local radius of the centerline pixels
16∼18 Value of L, A, B of the centerline pixels
19∼21 Value of contrast, energy and homogeneity by using GLCM (as entropy always results in bad)
22∼24 Mean of L, A, B over the 8-neighborhood of the centerline pixels
25∼27 Mean green, red and blue intensities of around the centerline pixels
28∼35 Mean intensity over the 8-neighborhood of the centerline pixel in a Gaussian blurred
(σ = 2, 4, 8, 16) of red and green plane
36∼38 Mean value for all pixels of each segment in red, green, blue image
39∼41 Mean value for all pixels of each segment in H, I, S channel
42∼44 Variance value for all pixels of each segment in red, green, blue image
45∼47 Variance value for all pixels of each segment in H, I, S channel
48∼50 Mean value for all pixels of each segment in L, A, B channel
51 A-LPB feature in gray images
Based on enhanced 52∼54 Red, green and blue intensities of the centerline pixels
contrast images 55 Intensity of the centerline pixels
(16) 56∼58 L, A, B of the centerline pixels
59∼61 Mean value of red green and blue intensities of around the centerline pixels
62∼64 Mean value of L, A, B over the 8-neighborhood of the centerline pixels
65∼67 Mean value for all pixels of each segment in L, A, B channel
Based on normalized 68∼70 Red, green, and blue intensities of the centerline pixels
images (13) 71∼73 Red, green, and blue intensities over the 8-neighborhood of the centerline pixels
74∼76 Variance value of red, green, and blue intensities over the 8-neighborhood of the centerline pixels
77∼78 Maximum and minimum value for all pixels of each segment in red image
79∼80 Maximum and minimum value for all pixels of each segment in green image

illustrate our method. There are two-dimension (2D) the same type by definition. The final label assigned to
feature sets and we apply KNN for classification. We a centerline pixel thus depends on the labels assigned
usually use Euclidean distance to calculate the distance to the other centerline pixels in the vessel segment. Be-
between the unknown sample and each training sample, cause our method does not fit vessels with one or two
which is calculates as (3). pixels, we only classify the vessels with more than two
v pixels, which is enough for measuring AVR.
u n
uX
d(x, y) = t (xk − yk )2 . (3)
k=1
3 Results

In this example, n = 2. And then we put the for-
mula in this way:
v rence standard is obtained by an expert who manu-
u n
uX
d(x, y) = t (wk × (xk − yk )2 ).
k=1
If w1 = 1, w2 = 1, d(x, y) is the Euclidean distance.
If we change w1 → +∞, feature 1 (f1 ) becomes a deci-
sive role and the role of feature 2 (f2 ) can be ignored.
Based on this idea, we propose the FW-KNN algorithm
and apply it to arteriovenous classification.
Each centerline pixel is assigned a soft label after
FW-KNN algorithm is performed. We use the fact that
connected centerline pixels in a vessel segment are all of
The DRIVE database and the INSPIRE-AVR
database are used to evaluate our method. The refe-
ally labeled the vessel centerline segments in each im-
age. There is a difference in vessel centerline extraction
between the expert manual method and our method;
therefore we retrieve the label on each segment pixel
extracted by our method, and assign the most frequent
label in the segment as the final label of the segment.
Table 3 shows the classification property indexes.
“A” represents one label, and “B” represents another
label. True positive (T P ) is the number of pixels cor-
rectly classified as “A”. False positive (F P ) is the num-
ber of vein pixels misclassified as “A”. True negative
1228 J. Comput. Sci. & Technol., Nov. 2017, Vol.32, No.6

(T N ) is the number of pixels correctly classified as “B”. Feature Weighting Results. We add weight by FW-
And false negative (F N ) is the number of artery pixels KNN to the features based on the results of feature
misclassified as “B”. selection. Weight settings are set as follows: the weight
of the features 1∼20 is 0.5, that of features 21∼40 is 0.3,
Table 3. Comparison of the Result with the Ground Truth that of features 41∼60 is 0.2 and that of features 61∼80
is 0. And an accuracy value of 88.65% is obtained.
Classification “A” Label in “B” Label in
These results turn out our feature selection is useful.
Ground Truth Ground Truth
The best classification results of the test retinal vessels
“A” pixels True positive (T P ) False positive (F P ) from the DRIVE database are shown in Table 5. The
“B” pixels False negative (F N ) True negative (T N ) average accuracy of our method is 88.65%. Compared
with the previous methods used for the classification
The accuracy (Acc), sensitivity (Sn), and speci- of retinal vessels into arteries and veins, the technique
ficity (Sp) are used to measure the performance of the used in this paper is easier to implement and the accu-
arterial-venous. It is obviously that the sensitivity of racy of vessel classification is higher. The comparison
arteries is equal to the specificity of veins. Thus we is shown in Table 6.
regard “A” label as arteries, and the accuracy (Acc),
sensitivity (Sn), and specificity (Sp) are shown in Ta-
Table 5. Segmentation Results of Our Method (DRIVE)
ble 4.
Image Sn Sp Acc
Table 4. Performance Measures of Arterial-Venous 11 test 1.000 0 0.897 2 0.965 4

Classification 12 test 0.792 0 1.000 0 0.869 8

13 test 0.854 7 0.928 1 0.888 6
Performance Measure Description
14 test 0.946 7 0.851 9 0.893 8
Sensitivity (Sn) T P/(T P + F N )
15 test 0.782 6 1.000 0 0.851 8
Specificity (Sp) T N/(T N + F P )
16 test 0.976 6 0.975 2 0.975 7
Accuracy (Acc) (T P + T N )/(T P + F P + T N + F N )
17 test 0.608 7 1.000 0 0.778 0
18 test 0.769 2 0.835 8 0.797 9
19 test 0.801 3 0.901 7 0.843 7
3.1 Results on DRIVE
20 test 1.000 0 1.000 0 1.000 0
Direct Results. We select the first 10 images from Average 0.853 2 0.939 0 0.886 5
the 20 test images as the training set for the KNN classi- Maximum 1.000 0 1.000 0 1.000 0
fier and the rest are the test set. An accuracy of 80.69% Minimum 0.608 7 0.835 8 0.778 0

is achieved for the classification of centerline pixels of

the vessels in ROI. This result proves good feature ex-
traction.
Feature Selection Results. We put the training set
into the mRMR algorithm and the output is a final set
sorted by importance. The result of feature selection
shows the red and the green of RGB color space are the
most important features and their relevant features are
also vital. The light plane (L) from the LAB color space
is the second dominant feature. A-LBP features also
play an important role. We use 10-fold cross-validation
to select the best feature subset of the results. We ran-
domly divide the training data into ten parts and use
each of them as test data while using the other nine
as training data. We choose the subset which has the
highest accuracy as the selected subset. The selected
subset of features is used for KNN training and test-
ing. And the percentage of correctly-classified vessel is
84.69%.
Table 6. Comparison with Existing Methods on DRIVE
Method Acc
[19] 0.870 0
[10] 0.862 0
Our method 0.886 5
3.2 Results on INSPIRE-AVR
For the 40 images of the INSPIRE-AVR database,
we select the first 20 images from 40 images as the train-
ing set and the rest as the test set. The best accuracy of
correctly-classified vessel segments using the proposed
method is 88.51%, which is similar to the value achieved
by Relan et al.[10] (87.60%). An example of automatic
classification of INSPIRE-AVR images can be observed
in Fig.5. The differences between the results of the pro-
posed method and manual labeling are shown in green
Bei-Ji Zou et al.: Supervised Vessels Classification Based on Feature Selection
(a) (b)
Fig.5. Results of INSPIRE-AVR classification. (a) Original images. (b) Segmentation results. (c) Our results in ROI (red: correctly
classified arteries, blue: correctly classified veins, green: wrongly classified vessels).
(wrongly classified arteries) and yellow (wrongly clas-
sified veins), while the correctly classified arteries and
veins are presented in red and blue, respectively.
4 Conclusions
In this paper, we focused on the feature design and
selection for better performance of arterial-venous clas-
sification of blood vessels. We extracted 80 features in-
cluding the local features, the GLCM features, and an
A-LBP feature. The mRMR scheme was used for the
feature selection and the selected features were used to
train and test with the FW-KNN classifier for the ves-
sel classification. The results are very promising with
an average accuracy of 88.65% and 88.5% on DRIVE
and INSPIRE-AVR database, respectively.
The vessel classification in ROI is enough for mea-
suring the AVR. And the small vessels are also impor-
tant for the automatic detection of relevant diseases.
Therefore, the next target can be computing the value
of AVR. Further research needs to be done to explore
the effects with different features and other feature se-
lection methods.
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Bei-Ji Zou received his B.S. degree
in computer software from Zhejiang
University, Hangzhou, in 1982, his
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer
science and technology from Tsinghua
University, Beijing, in 1984, and Hu-
nan University, Changsha, in 2001,
respectively. He joined the School
of Computer and Communication at Hunan University,
Changsha, in 1984, where he became an associate professor
in 1997, and a professor in 2001. He served as the vice
dean there since 1997. He is currently a professor and
served as the dean at the School of Information Science
and Engineering in Central South University, Changsha.
His research interest is focused on computer graphics,
image processing and virtual reality technology. Until now
he has published more than 100 papers in journals.
J. Comput. Sci. & Technol., Nov. 2017, Vol.32, No.6
Yao Chen received her B.S. degree
in geophysics from Wuhan University,
Wuhan, in 2016. She is currently a grad-
uate student at Central South Univer-
sity, Changsha. Her Research interests
include image processing and computer
vision. text text text text text text text
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Cheng-Zhang Zhu received her
M.E. degree in computer science and
education from Huazhong University
of Science and Technology, Wuhan, in
2006 and her Ph.D. degree in control
science and engineering from School of
Information Science and Engineering,
Central South University, Changsha,
in 2016. Currently, she is a faculty of the College of
Literature and Journalism, Central South University,
Changsha. Her research interests include medical image
processing, computer vision and pattern recognition.text
text text text text text text
Zai-Liang Chen received his Ph.D.
degree in computer science from Central
South University, Changsha, in 2012.
He is currently an associate profes-
sor with Central South University,
Changsha, and the associate director
of the Center for Ophthalmic Imaging
Research, Central South University,
Changsha. In 2014, he was a visiting scholar with the
Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey. He has
authored or co-authored over 30 papers in journals and
conferences. His recent research interests include computer
vision, medical image analysis, and large-scale medical
image processing.
Zi-Qian Zhang received his B.S.
degree in electronic science and techno-
logy from Central South University,
Changsha, in 2016. He is currently
a graduate student at Central South
University, Changsha. His Research
interests include image processing and
pattern recognition.text text text text
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