Authors:
Md. Alauddin Bhuiyan
;
Baikunth Nath
and
Joselito Chua
Affiliation:
Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Keyword(s):
Medical Image, Blood Vessel, Adaptive Region Growing technique, Gradient Operator, Segmentation.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Image and Video Analysis
;
Medical Image Analysis
Abstract:
Blood vessel segmentation from the retinal images is extremely important for assessing retinal abnormalities. A good amount of research has been reported on blood vessel segmentation, but significant improvement is still a necessity particularly on minor vessel segmentation. As the local contrast of blood vessels is unstable (intensity variation), especially in unhealthy retinal images, it becomes very complicated to detect the vessels from the retinal images. In this paper, we propose an edge based vessel segmentation technique to overcome the problem of large intensity variation between major and minor vessels. The edge is detected by considering the adaptive value of gradient employing Region Growing Algorithm, from where parallel edges are computed to select vessels. Our proposed method is efficient and performs well in detecting blood vessels including minor vessels.