Modeling and extraction of retinal blood vessels from RetCam 3 based on morphological segmentation

Abstract

This paper deals with the analysis and modeling of the retinal blood vessels system. The aim of the analysis is the design and implementation of a fully automated segmentation model based on the morphological segmentation, allowing for extraction of the blood system area within the binary model, where other retinal structures are suppressed. An important feature of the model is sensitivity and robustness to declare the efficacy of segmentation in an environment with worse image parameters. For this reason, the designed model is also tested for data where the vascular system is visualized under a low contrast. Part of the analysis is the comparative testing of the designed model against selected segmentation methods based on objective criteria. The designed model was tested and verified on dataset from system RetCam 3 containing 22 images.