Automated segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images based on entropy weighted thresholding

Abstract

ABSTRACT Automated extraction of retinal vasculature is becoming a crucial task during the study of pathological disorders present in the retinal fundus image. In this work, we propose an unsupervised approach for automatically extracting blood vessels from fundus photographs. In this paper, Logarithmic transformation (Log) and contrast limited adaptive histogram equalisation (CLAHE) are being used to boost the contrast level of the fundus photographs. After that, Matched filtering technique is used for further vessel enhancement. Then, different thresholding techniques are evaluated and compared to find out the best thresholding scheme for this segmentation. We have found that Otsu with entropy weighting thresholding is the best threshold method for segmenting the blood vessels. In the post-processing step, the area-based thresholding process is considered, and it gives the final vessel segmented image. Using the following statistical measures, the final vessel segmented image is compared to the ground truth image, such as sensitivity (Sens), precision (Spec), and accuracy (Acc). This work is evaluated by freely accessible DRIVE (Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction), STARE (Structured Analysis of the Retina), and CHASE_DB1 (Child Heart and Health Study in England) datasets. This work achieves an average accuracy of 0.9562, 0.946, and 0.946 on the DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE_DB1 datasets, respectively.