Blood Vessel Enhancement and Segmentation Using Wavelet Transform

Retinal vessel segmentation is an essential step for the diagnoses of various eye diseases. An automated tool for blood vessel segmentation is useful to eye specialists for purpose of patient screening and clinical study. Vascular pattern is normally not visible in retinal images. In this paper, we present a method for enhancing, locating and segmenting blood vessels in images of retina. We present a method that uses 2-D Gabor wavelet and sharpening filter to enhance and sharpen the vascular pattern respectively. This technique locates and segments the blood vessels using edge detection algorithm and morphological operations. This technique is tested on publicly available STARE database of manually labeled images which has been established to facilitate comparative studies on segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images. The validation of our retinal image vessel segmentation technique is supported by experimental results.