Detection of Blood Vessels in Retinal Images

Abstract

This paper presents a method to segment blood vessels in retinal images. It is based on mathematical morphology and the anisotropic diffusion and is composed of four steps: image processing by using linear filter and morphological ones, details extraction by using top-hat transform, morphological reconstruction of vascular tree and post processing steps using anisotropic diffusion. Our method is tested on red-free retinal images, taken from two public database. Our results on both public databases were comparable in performance with other authors. The method achieves a good result by mean of the "receiver operating characteristic curve" (ROC). The results show that our method is significantly better than other rule-based methods.