An automated blood vessel extraction algorithm in fundus images

This paper focuses on the extraction of retinal blood vessels which play vital roles in early diagnosis and prevention of several diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes, arteriosclerosis, cardiovascular disease and stroke. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of powerful image processing techniques such as, contrast enhancement, filtration and thresholding for more efficient segmentation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, experiments are conducted on 40 images collected from DRIVE database. The results show that the proposed algorithm yields better results compared to other known algorithms.