Detection of retinal vascular bifurcations by rotation-, scale- and reflection-invariant COSFIRE filters

Author

Azzopardi, George ; Petkov, Nicolai

Author_Institution

Johann Bernoulli Inst. for Math. & Comput. Sci., Univ. of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

fYear

2012

fDate

20-22 June 2012

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

We propose trainable filters, which we call COSFIRE (Combination Of Shifted FIlter REsponses), and use to detect vascular bifurcations in retinal images. We configure a COSFIRE filter to be selective for a bifurcation that is specified by a user in a single-step training phase. The automatic configuration comprises the selection of channels of a bank of Gabor filters and the determination of certain blur and shift parameters. A COSFIRE filter response is computed as the geometric mean of the blurred and shifted responses of the selected Gabor filters. The proposed filters share similar properties with some shape-selective neurons in visual cortex. With only five filters we achieve a recall of 98.57% at a precision of 95.37% on the 40 binary retinal images (from DRIVE), containing more than 5000 bifurcations.

Keywords

Gabor filters; eye; medical image processing; object detection; Gabor filters; blurred responses; combination of shifted filter responses; reflection-invariant COSFIRE filters; retinal images; retinal vascular bifurcation detection; rotation-invariant COSFIRE filters; scale-invariant COSFIRE filters; shape-selective neurons; shifted responses; visual cortex; Bifurcation; Feature extraction; Gabor filters; Manuals; Prototypes; Retina; Visualization;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS), 2012 25th International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Rome

ISSN

1063-7125

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-2049-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CBMS.2012.6266338

Filename

6266338