Deep neural network and random forest hybrid architecture for learning to detect retinal vessels in fundus images

Vision impairment due to pathological damage of the retina can largely be prevented through periodic screening using fundus color imaging. However the challenge with large-scale screening is the inability to exhaustively detect fine blood vessels crucial to disease diagnosis. In this work we present a computational imaging framework using deep and ensemble learning based hybrid architecture for reliable detection of blood vessels in fundus color images. A deep neural network (DNN) is used for unsupervised learning of vesselness dictionaries using sparse trained denoising auto-encoders (DAE), followed by supervised learning of the DNN response using a random forest for detecting vessels in color fundus images. In experimental evaluation with the DRIVE database, we achieve the objective of vessel detection with max. avg. accuracy of 0.9327 and area under ROC curve of 0.9195.