IEEE-201S0

Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation using

Morphological Structuring Element and Entropy
Thresholding
2
Sumathy.B i, Dr Poornachandra S

iResearch Scholar, Anna University of Technology , Chennai - 600 113

bs umathymathu@rediffinail.com
2Dean, Department of ECE, SNS Co liege of Engineer ing, Coimbatore - 64 1 10 7

pcmed8@yahoo.com

Abstract-An automated segmentation method for Retinal blood
vessel extraction is developed. The method uses Morphological
structuring element and basic filters for preprocessing. The
prepro cessing step enhances and makes the retinal images most
suitable for vessel extraction. Thresholding technique is
employed to extract the blood vessels from the background
image. This method is evaluated on the two publicly available
data bases namely S TARE and DRIVE data base. This method is
compared with the matched filter method for segmentation and
kirsch template method. Our method gives appreciable blood
vessel extraction as compared with other methods.
Keywords-segmentation, blood vessel extraction, preprocessing
thresholding, motphologica/ strnctunng element.
I. INTRODUCTION
Ocular fundus images provide necessary information about
retinal and various systemic and non-systemic diseases.
Fundus image analysis is one of the non-invasive techniques,
and needs automatic method to avoid traditional manual
grading. Diabetic etinopathy (DR ) is one of the leading ocular
diseases. The WHO predicts that 135m i llion people around
worldwide are having diabetes and this will rise to 3 00 m i ll ion
by 2025 [15]. The statistics of occurrence will raise double by
2050 . The persons having diabetes is affected by DR, around
The paper is organized as follows. In section II, Re lated
works for retinal blood segmentation are briefly mentioned.
Section ill discuss about the proposed method. In Section IV
Results and future scope are discussed.
II. RELATED WORKS
The automated method of segmentation and
extraction of vessel central lines are presented in [4 ] . Iterative
Region Growing method is employed for vessel segmentation
along with morphological filtering. In [1] , Y. B. Soares et al.
presented an automated segmentation of retinal vasculature in
fundus images. The method produced segmentations based on
class ification of each p ixe I as vessel or non-vessel on pixe I
feature vectors. The above method modeled complex decision
surfaces along with a Bayesian classifier [1]. In [7], three
different methods for vessel segmentation main Iy for MA's
detection, the earliest sign of DR were discussed. A supervised
method for blood vessel segmentation using NN scheme [12]
for pixel classification was developed. It computed a 7-D
vector composed of gray level and moment invariants based
features for pixel representation. The metrics evaluated were
sensitivity, specific ity, positive predictive values. In [13 ], an
automated method of locating blood vessels was discussed.

24,000 every year. Local and global vessel features together were taken into
account to segment vessel network.
Diabetic Retinopathy occurs, when the blood glucose level
is abnormally raised and causes damage to blood vessels. DR ill. PROPOSED METHOD
causes several types of lesion and the most common lesion is
m icroaneurysm, which is the first symptom. They appear as
The method has been tested and evaluated on two publicly
small red dots. As the disease progresses , capillary vessels
available databases namely STARE and DR IVE database.
begin to leak, form ing exudates, lipid deposits and become
STARE provides SO images with a var iety of diagnoses
yellow lesions. Larger, dark red blot haemorrhage may also
captured by a Topcon TRY-50 fundus camera at 45 deg FOY
develop during m i ld stage. The next stage is proliferative stage,
in PPM format. Dr ive, photographs are obtained from D R
abnormal vessel changes as venous beading, Intra Retinal
screening program i n Netherlands, used for clinical diagnoses.
Micro vascular Abnormalities (IRMA) and [mally formation
Images acquired using Canon CRS non-mydriatic 3 CCD
of new vessel growth , leading to vitreous haemorrhage,
cameras with a 45 deg FOY, in TIFF for m at.
fibrosis and ultimately retinal detachment[3 ]. (f ig. l,2) There
requires a need to develop an inexpensive, mass screening The proposed method has two main processing phases. One
automatic detection and analysis technique for DR to reduce is preprocessing using structuring element for retinal blood
the socio economic consequences of vision loss. E xt raction of vessel enhancement and second phase is for vessel
blood vessels from the retinal images helps us in Diagnosis, segmentation. The preprocessing step includes vessel central
treatment evaluation and study of various diseases. [7] line reflex removal followed by back ground equalization and
the preprocessing ended by the vessel enhancement step.

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Vessel segmentation phase is done by entropy thresholding B. Blo o d Vessel Extraction

technique to extract blood vessels from background image.
Blood vessels are to be extracted for analysis of diseased
Each of these phases is detailed and illustrated.
condition or nonnal condition. This is done by a vessel
Input image is a R GB image and only green segmentation method using entropy thresholding technique.
channeVGray scale image is to be extracted. This channel The preprocessed image from the previous stage is chosen as
image has a better contrast when compared with the other two the input to this segmentation phase. Here , the spatial
channels. Better contrast is achieved between the background distribution of pixels is taken in to account. The entropy
images with the vessels. Hence, gray scale image is selected thresholding technique described in [9] is discussed here.
for preprocessing. This channel is considered as the natural Images with same histogram will differ in its spatial
basis for vessel segmentation algorithms. The preprocessing distribution and result in different entropy.
step is involved in order to avoid or reduce the non-uniform
illum ination of images during acquisition, removal of noise (3)
present etc. and make image suitable for vessel e xtraction.
The equation (3) gives the spatial structure information of
A. Prepro cessing ofRetinal image
an image. Depending on the value i, j, different co­
Preprocessing involves four steps. concurrence gray level m atr ix will be defined, whose elements
l)RGB to Gray image: F irst is the conversion of R GB are specified
images in to a Gray scale im age using suitable command.The by the numbers of trans itions between all pairs of grey levels
blood vessels appear darker than its background. is
2) Vessel Central light Reflex removal: The blood vessels G = {O, 1,. .. , L - I} in a particu lar way. Cons ider co­
always accompany a light reflex , which is to be removed for occurrence matrix is an asymmetric matrix that only considers
its brightness. Light reflex runs down the central length of the the gray level transitions between two adjacent Pixels.
blood vessel and hence this stage called vessel central light
reflex removal. Gray scale image is filtered by a flat disc
shaped structuring element followed by a morphological
opening to remove the light reflex. Then the image is further (4)
filtered by an average filter to remove noise components. The
average fi Iter is a predefined 2-D dig ital filter.
3) Background Equalization: Equalization is done to avoid where U= 1 for f(l , k)= i & f(l,k+ 1)=j or f(1,k)=i & f(l+ l,k)=j
variations in intensity for the same image. Its importance is to U =0 otherwise
remove background lightening variation and shade corrected
image is obtained. No ise removal is done for the processed Normalizing the total number of transitions in the co­
image by a Gaussian kernel filter with zero mean and real occurrence matr ix , a des ired trans ition probability fro m gray
value of sd. The background image is produced from the level i to gray level) is obtained by
original gray image by an averaging filter . Then the
background image is removed from the original image to
obtain the shade corrected image. (5)

Let th be a value used to threshold an image. It

partitions a co-occurrence matrix into four quadrants, namely,
A, B, C and D .
Then the histogram of shade corrected image is done o th
L-t
to non-illum ination, and homogenized or equalized image is
got. Histogram is applied by taking threshold value as the
A
B
m iddle of the gray level. The background pixels in images
with th

different illum ination condition will be equalized around the c D

m iddle value. ( F ig.3 (b»
L-t

These four quadrants can be further grouped into two

classes, referred to as local quadrants and joint quadrants. The
4) Vessel Enhancement:Enhancement of vessel is done by
pixe ls with gray levels above the threshold are assigned to
us ing Top-Hat transformat ion along with a mo rphological
foreground (objects), and those equal to or below the threshold
structuring element, opening. The white bright retinal
are assigned to the background. Then quadrants A and C
structures are removed and blood vessels are enhanced.
correspond to local transitions within background and
(F ig. 3.(c))
foreground.

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The probability associated with each quadrant are given by

th th

PA = LLVii
i=Oj"=O
(6)
}
The probabilities in each quadrant can be further
obtained by normalization-cell probabi lities.

Vesse! Central line

(7) reflex removal

Second-order entropy of the object and background is

found. The gray level cor responding to the maximum of total
entropy gives the optimal threshold for object-background
classification. Thus, the blood vessels are segmented from
background. (Fig. 3 & 4. (d»

Homogenizati on
IV. RESUL IS AND DISCUSSION

The proposed method has been tested with the images

available in STARE and DRIVE data bases. This method
retains the computational simplicity and gives almost an
appreciable segmentation for extraction of vessels. The
method is able to detect smaller b lood vessels also. Our
method is compared with the Kirsch temp late method and the
outputs are shown in (Fig.S (b) & S(c )) .
From the extracted blood vessels we can able to predict
nonnal and abnonnal cases of diabetic retinopathy and to Flow chart: 1. Enhancement Stage
classifY it as m ild, severe, prolife rative stage. But, it needs
hand labeled and clinical features of retinal vasculature from
doctors. Co-occurrence Matrix
As, a future scope the following statements can be
framed. The automated method may be further enhanced to
calculate performance indices. To differentiate various levels
and stages of DR in a very accurate and robust manner, to
detect at its earlier stage itself. Data can be collected from
hospitals for any new and different occurrence disease
structure. Any of suitable optimization technique could be
emp loyed for further improvement in segmentation, analysis
and classification. Pixels> Threshold
(Fore ground Obiiec1l:s)

Pixels � Tfu:"eshoid
(Backgrol!illd Obj ects)

Sec and Order Entropy

Tota] Maximum Entropy

Fig. l. Proliferative retinopathy Fig. 2. Large. dark h a emorrhage Flow chart: 2. Vessel Extraction

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Input Image Vessel extraction Image

Homogenized Image

---, -
Vessel Enhancement Image

\
J

,_,i 4. )

Input Image Homogenized Image Vessel Enhancement Image Vessel Ex t ract ion I ma ge
�--

Homogenized Image Vessel Enhancement Image Vessel Extraction Image

�
'�
(a ) (b) (c) (d)

Fig. 3. (a) Images for the STARE database, (b) Homogenized Image, (c) Vessel Enhancement Image,
(d) Vessel Extraction Image -Segmentation results of our method

Input Image
Homogenized Image Vessel Enhancement Image Vessel Extraction Image

�
�
Input Image Homogenized Image Vessel Extraction Image
Vessel Enhancement Image

/j-,
. --

(a ) (b) (c) (d)

Fig. 4. (a) Images for the DRIVE database, (b) Homogenized Image, (c) Vessel Enhancement Image,
(d) Vessel Extraction Image -Segmentation resuks of o ur method

Extracted Blood Vessels Vessel Extraction Image Input Image Extracted Blood Vessels Vessel Extraction Image

(a) (b)
0 (c)
(a ) (b)
~ (c)
Figure 5. (a) Original Image, (b) Kirsch method, (c) Propo sed method
Figure 5. (a ) Original Image, (b) Kirsch meth od, (c) Proposed method

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