Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation Using Ensemble of Single Oriented Mask Filters

Abstract

This paper describes a method on segmentation of blood vessel in retinal images using supervised approach. Blood vessel segmentation in retinal images can be used for analyses in diabetic retinopathy automated screening. It is a very exhausting job and took a very long time to segment retinal blood vessels manually. Moreover these tasks also requires training and skills. The strategy involves the applications of Support Vector Machine to classify each pixel whether it belongs to a vessel or not. Single mask filters which consist of intensity values of normalized green channel have been generated according to the direction of angles. These single oriented mask filters contain the vectors of the neighbourhood of each pixel. Five images randomly selected from DRIVE database are used to train the classifier. Every single oriented mask filters are ranked according to the average accuracy of training images and their weights are assigned based on this rank.  Ensemble approaches that are Addition With Weight and Product With Weight have been used to combine all these single mask filters. In order to test the proposed approach, two standard databases, DRIVE and STARE have been used. The results of the proposed method clearly show improvement compared to other single oriented mask filters.