Blood Vessel Extraction Based on Mumford Shah Model and Skeletonization

Locating blood vessels in a retinal image has found wide applications in medical image for diagnosis of diseases. However, due to the presence of noise and uneven distributed image intensity, this is still a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce a new method based on the features that the blood vessel must be a thin concave connected region. Based on Mumford-Shah (MS) model and skeletonization method, the proposed method is able to extract many small branches of vessels. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods and able to yield good results in real world data sets