%D 2006
%L scholars77
%J Proceedings of the 8th IASTED International Conference on Signal and Image Processing, SIP 2006
%O cited By 0; Conference of 8th IASTED International Conference on Signal and Image Processing, SIP 2006 and the 10th IASTED International Conference on Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications, IMSA 2006 ; Conference Date: 14 August 2006 Through 16 August 2006; Conference Code:74039
%X Information of retinal vasculature morphology is being used in grading the severity and progression of diabetic retinopathy. An image analysis system can assist ophthalmologist make accurate diagnosis in an efficient manner. In this paper, the development of an image processing algorithm for detecting and reconstructing of retinal vasculature is presented. The detection of the vascular structure is achieved by image enhancement using contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization followed by the extraction of the vessels using Bottom-hat morphological transformation. For reconstruction of the complete retinal vasculature, a region growing technique based on first-order Gaussian derivative is developed. The technique incorporates both gradient magnitude change and average intensity as the homogeneity criteria that enable the process to adapt to intensity changes and intensity spread over the vasculature region. The reconstruction technique reduces the required number of seeds to near optimal for the region growing process. It also overcomes poor performance of current seed-based methods especially in low and inconsistent contrast images as normally seen in vasculature regions of fundus images. Simulations of the algorithm on 20 test images from the DRIVE database shows that it outperforms many other published methods and achieved an accuracy (ability to detect both vessel and non-vessel pixels) range of 0.91-0.95, a sensitivity (ability to detect vessel pixels) range of 0.91-0.95 and a specificity (ability to detect non-vessel pixels) range of 0.88-0.94.
%K Agricultural products; Computer systems; Digital image storage; Eye protection; Image analysis; Image processing; Imaging systems; Internet protocols; Multimedia systems; Pixels; Repair; Restoration; Sugar (sucrose); Trellis codes, Adaptive histogram equalizations; Average intensities; Contrast images; Diabetic retinopathies; First orders; Fundus images; Gaussian derivative; Gaussian derivatives; Gradient magnitudes; Image analysis systems; Image processing algorithms; Intensity changes; Morphological transformations; Poor performances; Reconstruction techniques; Region growing; Retinal vasculature; Retinal vasculature detection and reconstruction; Test images; Vascular structures; Vasculature, Image enhancement
%P 289-296
%C Honolulu, HI
%A M.H. Ahmad Fadzil
%A L.I. Izhar
%A P.A. Venkatachalam
%A T.V.N. Karunakar
%T Extraction and reconstruction of retinal vasculature for diabetic retinopathy