Vessel segmentation in retinal images with a multiple kernel learning based method

Blood vessel segmentation is an important problem for quantitative structure analysis of retinal images, and many diseases are related to the structure changes. Manual segmentation is time consuming and computer aided segmentation is required to deal with large amount images. This paper presents a new supervised method for segmentation of blood vessels in retinal photographs. Multiple kernel learning (MKL) is introduced to deal with the problem, utilizing features from Hessian matrix based vesselness measure, response of multiscale Gabor filter, and multiple scale line strength features. The method is evaluated on the publicly available DRIVE and STARE databases. The performance of the MKL method is evaluated and experimental results show the high accuracy of the proposed method.