A fast method for automated detection of blood vessels in retinal images

Author

Wang, Yiming ; Lee, Samuel C.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Oklahoma Univ., Norman, OK, USA

Volume

2

fYear

1997

fDate

2-5 Nov. 1997

Firstpage

1700

Abstract

This paper presents a fast method for automated detection of blood vessels in retinal images. Edges of blood vessels are first extracted by Sobel operators. To make the algorithm fast, edge thinning is employed to preserve only one seed point along each cross section of the vessels. Local windowing and local thresholding are then applied to each preserved seed point to transform the local gray-scale images to a binary map. Twelve binary matched filters are employed to search for vessel segments and the final vessel map is obtained by a single-linkage region growing technique with adaptive thresholds.

Keywords

blood; edge detection; eye; feature extraction; matched filters; medical image processing; object detection; Sobel operators; adaptive thresholds; automated detection; binary matched filters; blood vessels; cross section; edge thinning; local gray-scale images; local thresholding; local windowing; retinal images; seed point; single-linkage region growing technique; vessel map; vessel segments; Arteries; Biomedical imaging; Blood vessels; Diseases; Image edge detection; Image segmentation; Matched filters; Optical filters; Retina; Veins;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Signals, Systems & Computers, 1997. Conference Record of the Thirty-First Asilomar Conference on

Conference_Location

Pacific Grove, CA, USA

ISSN

1058-6393

Print_ISBN

0-8186-8316-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ACSSC.1997.679192

Filename

679192