Analysis of Colour Retinal Images Aimed at Segmentation of Vessel Structures

Abstract

Segmentation of vessel structure is an important phase in analysis of retinal images. The resulting vessel system description may be important for diagnostic of many eye and cardiovascular diseases. A method for automatic segmentation of the vessel structure in colour retinal images is presented in the thesis. The method utilises 2D matched filtering to detect presence of short linear vessel sections of a particular thickness and orientation. The approach correlates the local image areas with a 2D masks based on a typical brightness profile perpendicular to vessels of a particular width. Three different approximated profiles are used and corresponding matched filters are designed for: thin, medium and thick vessels. The evaluation of typical vessel profiles and filter design are described in chapter 3 and chapter 4. The parametric images obtained by convolution of the image with the masks are then thresholded in order to obtain binary representation of vessel structure. The three binary representations are consequently combined to provide the best available rough vessel map, which is finalised by complementing the obviously missing vessel sections and cleaning the disconnected fractional artefacts. The thresholding algorithm and final steps of processing are mentioned in chapter 5 and chapter 6. The method has been implemented by computer and the program for automatic vessel segmentation has been developed using database of real retinal images. The efficiency of the method has been finally evaluated on images from the standard database DRIVE