1,913 research outputs found
Retinal Vessel Segmentation Using the 2-D Morlet Wavelet and Supervised Classification
We present a method for automated segmentation of the vasculature in retinal
images. The method produces segmentations by classifying each image pixel as
vessel or non-vessel, based on the pixel's feature vector. Feature vectors are
composed of the pixel's intensity and continuous two-dimensional Morlet wavelet
transform responses taken at multiple scales. The Morlet wavelet is capable of
tuning to specific frequencies, thus allowing noise filtering and vessel
enhancement in a single step. We use a Bayesian classifier with
class-conditional probability density functions (likelihoods) described as
Gaussian mixtures, yielding a fast classification, while being able to model
complex decision surfaces and compare its performance with the linear minimum
squared error classifier. The probability distributions are estimated based on
a training set of labeled pixels obtained from manual segmentations. The
method's performance is evaluated on publicly available DRIVE and STARE
databases of manually labeled non-mydriatic images. On the DRIVE database, it
achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of
0.9598, being slightly superior than that presented by the method of Staal et
al.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures and 1 table. Accepted for publication in IEEE
Trans Med Imag; added copyright notic
Delineation of line patterns in images using B-COSFIRE filters
Delineation of line patterns in images is a basic step required in various
applications such as blood vessel detection in medical images, segmentation of
rivers or roads in aerial images, detection of cracks in walls or pavements,
etc. In this paper we present trainable B-COSFIRE filters, which are a model of
some neurons in area V1 of the primary visual cortex, and apply it to the
delineation of line patterns in different kinds of images. B-COSFIRE filters
are trainable as their selectivity is determined in an automatic configuration
process given a prototype pattern of interest. They are configurable to detect
any preferred line structure (e.g. segments, corners, cross-overs, etc.), so
usable for automatic data representation learning. We carried out experiments
on two data sets, namely a line-network data set from INRIA and a data set of
retinal fundus images named IOSTAR. The results that we achieved confirm the
robustness of the proposed approach and its effectiveness in the delineation of
line structures in different kinds of images.Comment: International Work Conference on Bioinspired Intelligence, July
10-13, 201
Detection of curved lines with B-COSFIRE filters: A case study on crack delineation
The detection of curvilinear structures is an important step for various
computer vision applications, ranging from medical image analysis for
segmentation of blood vessels, to remote sensing for the identification of
roads and rivers, and to biometrics and robotics, among others. %The visual
system of the brain has remarkable abilities to detect curvilinear structures
in noisy images. This is a nontrivial task especially for the detection of thin
or incomplete curvilinear structures surrounded with noise. We propose a
general purpose curvilinear structure detector that uses the brain-inspired
trainable B-COSFIRE filters. It consists of four main steps, namely nonlinear
filtering with B-COSFIRE, thinning with non-maximum suppression, hysteresis
thresholding and morphological closing. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a
data set of noisy images with cracked pavements, where we achieve
state-of-the-art results (F-measure=0.865). The proposed method can be employed
in any computer vision methodology that requires the delineation of curvilinear
and elongated structures.Comment: Accepted at Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP) 201
A retinal vasculature tracking system guided by a deep architecture
Many diseases such as diabetic retinopathy (DR) and cardiovascular diseases show their early signs on retinal vasculature. Analysing the vasculature in fundus images may provide a tool for ophthalmologists to diagnose eye-related diseases and to monitor their progression. These analyses may also facilitate the discovery of new relations between changes on retinal vasculature and the existence or progression of related diseases or to validate present relations.
In this thesis, a data driven method, namely a Translational Deep Belief Net (a TDBN), is adapted to vasculature segmentation. The segmentation performance of the TDBN on low resolution images was found to be comparable to that of the best-performing methods. Later, this network is used for the implementation of super-resolution for the segmentation of high resolution images. This approach provided an acceleration during segmentation, which relates to down-sampling ratio of an input fundus image. Finally, the TDBN is extended for the generation of probability maps for the existence of vessel parts, namely vessel interior, centreline, boundary and crossing/bifurcation patterns in centrelines. These probability maps are used to guide a probabilistic vasculature tracking system.
Although segmentation can provide vasculature existence in a fundus image, it does not give quantifiable measures for vasculature. The latter has more practical value in medical clinics. In the second half of the thesis, a retinal vasculature tracking system is presented. This system uses Particle Filters to describe vessel morphology and topology. Apart from previous studies, the guidance for tracking is provided with the combination of probability maps generated by the TDBN. The experiments on a publicly available dataset, REVIEW, showed that the consistency of vessel widths predicted by the proposed method was better than that obtained from observers. Moreover, very noisy and low contrast vessel boundaries, which were hardly identifiable to the naked eye, were accurately estimated by the proposed tracking system. Also, bifurcation/crossing locations during the course of tracking were detected almost completely. Considering these promising initial results, future work involves analysing the performance of the tracking system on automatic detection of complete vessel networks in fundus images.Open Acces
GGM classifier with multi-scale line detectors for retinal vessel segmentation
Persistent changes in the diameter of retinal blood vessels may indicate some chronic eye diseases. Computer-assisted change observation attempts may become challenging due to the emergence of interfering pathologies around blood vessels in retinal fundus images. The end result is lower sensitivity to thin vessels for certain computerized detection methods. Quite recently, multi-scale line detection method proved to be worthy for improved sensitivity toward lower-caliber vessels detection. This happens largely due to its adaptive property that responds more to the longevity patterns than width of a given vessel. However, the method suffers from the lack of a better aggregation process for individual line detectors. This paper investigates a scenario that introduces a supervised generalized Gaussian mixture classifier as a robust solution for the aggregate process. The classifier is built with class-conditional probability density functions as a logistic function of linear mixtures. To boost the classifier’s performance, the weighted scale images are modeled as Gaussian mixtures. The classifier is trained with weighted images modeled on a Gaussian mixture. The net effect is increased sensitivity for small vessels. The classifier’s performance has been tested with three commonly available data sets: DRIVE, SATRE, and CHASE_DB1. The results of the proposed method (with an accuracy of 96%, 96.1% and 95% on DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE_DB1, respectively) demonstrate its competitiveness against the state-of-the-art methods and its reliability for vessel segmentation
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