Retinal images: Blood vessel segmentation by threshold probing

An automated system for screening and diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy should segment blood vessels from colored retinal image to assist the ophthalmologists. We present a method for blood vessel enhancement and segmentation. This paper proposes a wavelet based method for vessel enhancement, piecewise threshold probing and adaptive thresholding for vessel localization and segmentation respectively. The method is tested on publicly available DRIVE and STARE databases of manually labeled images which has been established to facilitate comparative studies on segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 0.9469 on DRIVE database and of 0.9502 on STARE database.