RETINAL BLOOD VESSEL SEGMENTATION

APPROACH BASED ON ENHANCEMENT FILTERING

AND UNSUPERVISED CLASSIFICATION

ABSTRACT
Retinal blood vessels have a significant role in the diagnosis and treatment of
various retinal diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, arteriosclerosis,
and hypertension. For this reason, retinal vasculature extraction is important in
order to help specialists for the diagnosis and treatment of systematic diseases.
In this paper, a novel approach is developed to extract retinal blood vessel network.
Our method comprises four stages: (1) preprocessing stage in order to prepare
dataset for segmentation; (2) an enhancement procedure including Gabor, Frangi,
and Gauss filters obtained separately before a top-hat transform; (3) a hard and soft
clustering stage which includes K-means and Fuzzy C-means (FCM) in order to
get binary vessel map; and (4) a postprocessing step which removes falsely
segmented isolated regions.

EXISTING SYSTEM
For the extraction of the blood vessels in the angiogram; fuzzy filter and watershed
transformation are used. Multi-scale non-linear morphology opening operators
with structuring element which vary in size is used to estimate the background, and
then the background is subtracted from the image to achieve the contrast
normalization. A combined fuzzy morphological operation is applied on the
normalized angiogram with twelve linear structuring elements with nine pixels
length; the structuring element rotated every 150◦ between zero and 180◦.
Thresholding the filtered image to obtain the vessel region, then for approximating
the vessels centrelines, thinning operation is applied. Finally watershed techniques
are applied on vessel centerline to detect the vessel boundaries.

DISADVANTAGES
 The noise effect is more
 More computing time
 Less accuracy and efficiency
PROPOSED SYSTEM
In this proposed system, a novel approach is developed to extract retinal blood
vessel network. Our method comprises four stages: (1) preprocessing stage in order
to prepare dataset for segmentation; (2) an enhancement procedure including
Gabor, Frangi, and Gauss filters obtained separately before a top-hat transform; (3)
a hard and soft clustering stage which includes K-means and Fuzzy C-means
(FCM) in order to get binary vessel map; and (4) a postprocessing step which
removes falsely segmented isolated regions.

ADVANTAGES
 The noise effect is less
 To improve accuracy and efficiency
 To reduce the computation time
 This approach is simple and less complex in computation

APPLICATIONS
 Detection and measurement of bone, tissue, etc., in medical images
 Medical Image Compression
 Medical Image Denosing
 Medical Image Retrieval
 Tumor Detection
 The major applications of imaging in the radio band are in medicine and
astronomy

TOOL USED
 Matlab 2013
 Windows 7 Operating System
 RAM 8GB (minimum 4GB)
FLOW DIAGRAM