Title :
Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation Using Line Operators and Support Vector Classification
Author :
Ricci, Elisa ; Perfetti, Renzo
Author_Institution :
Univ. of Perugia, Perugia
Abstract :
In the framework of computer-aided diagnosis of eye diseases, retinal vessel segmentation based on line operators is proposed. A line detector, previously used in mammography, is applied to the green channel of the retinal image. It is based on the evaluation of the average grey level along lines of fixed length passing through the target pixel at different orientations. Two segmentation methods are considered. The first uses the basic line detector whose response is thresholded to obtain unsupervised pixel classification. As a further development, we employ two orthogonal line detectors along with the grey level of the target pixel to construct a feature vector for supervised classification using a support vector machine. The effectiveness of both methods is demonstrated through receiver operating characteristic analysis on two publicly available databases of color fundus images.
Keywords :
blood vessels; eye; medical image processing; support vector machines; average grey level; color fundus images; computer-aided diagnosis; eye diseases; line operators; orthogonal line detectors; pixel classification; receiver operating characteristic analysis; retinal blood vessel segmentation; support vector classification; support vector machine; Biomedical imaging; Blood vessels; Computer aided diagnosis; Detectors; Diseases; Image color analysis; Image segmentation; Mammography; Retina; Retinal vessels; Classification; line detector; retinal imaging; support vector machines (SVM); vessel segmentation; Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Humans; Image Enhancement; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; Pattern Recognition, Automated; Reproducibility of Results; Retinal Vessels; Retinoscopy; Sensitivity and Specificity;
Journal_Title :
Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TMI.2007.898551