Retinal vessel segmentation using ensemble classifier of bagged decision trees

This paper presents a new supervised method for segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images. This method uses an ensemble system of boot strapped decision trees and utilizes a feature vector based on the orientation analysis of gradient vector field, morphological linear transformation, line strength measures and Gabor filter responses. The feature vector encodes information to handle the healthy as well as the pathological retinal image. The method is evaluated on the publicly available DRIVE and STARE databases. Method performance on both sets of test images is better than the 2^nd human observer and other existing methodologies available in the literature. The incurred accuracy, speed, robustness and simplicity make the algorithm a suitable tool for automated retinal image analysis.