An Improved Method for Automatic Retinal Blood Vessel Vascular Segmentation Using Gabor Filter

Abstract

Early detection of Non-Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy (NDPR) is currently a highly interested research area in biomedical imaging. Ophthalmologists discover NDPR by observing the configu-ration of the vessel vascular network deliberately. Therefore, a computerized automatic system for the segmentation of vessel system will be an assist for ophthalmologists in order to detect an early stage of retinopathy. In this research, region based retinal vascular segmentation approach is suggested. In the steps of processing, the illumination variation of the fundus image is adjusted by using the point operators. Then, the edge features of the vessels are enhanced by applying the Gabor Filter. Finally, the region growing method with automatic seed point selection is used to ex-tract the vessel network from the image background. The experiments of the proposed algorithm are conducted on DRIVE dataset, which is an open access dataset. Results obtain an accuracy of 94.9% over the dataset that has been used.