On the Small Vessel Detection in High Resolution Retinal Images

In this paper, we proposed a new scheme for detection of small blood vessels in retinal images. A novel filter called Gabor variance filter and a modified histogram equalization technique are developed to enhance the contrast between vessels and background. Vessel segmentation is then performed on the enhanced map using thresholding and branch pruning based on the vessel structures. The experiments on high resolution images showed the desirable results with performance of 84.75% true positive rate and 0.15% false positive rate