Automated segmentation of retinal blood vessels in label-free fundus images
entails a pivotal role in computed aided diagnosis of ophthalmic pathologies,
viz., diabetic retinopathy, hypertensive disorders and cardiovascular diseases.
The challenge remains active in medical image analysis research due to varied
distribution of blood vessels, which manifest variations in their dimensions of
physical appearance against a noisy background.
In this paper we formulate the segmentation challenge as a classification
task. Specifically, we employ unsupervised hierarchical feature learning using
ensemble of two level of sparsely trained denoised stacked autoencoder. First
level training with bootstrap samples ensures decoupling and second level
ensemble formed by different network architectures ensures architectural
revision. We show that ensemble training of auto-encoders fosters diversity in
learning dictionary of visual kernels for vessel segmentation. SoftMax
classifier is used for fine tuning each member auto-encoder and multiple
strategies are explored for 2-level fusion of ensemble members. On DRIVE
dataset, we achieve maximum average accuracy of 95.33\% with an impressively
low standard deviation of 0.003 and Kappa agreement coefficient of 0.708 .
Comparison with other major algorithms substantiates the high efficacy of our
model.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper at IEEE EMBC, 201