Blood Vessel and Optic Disc Segmentation Based on a Metaheuristic Method

Abstract

In recent years, image processing techniques have been an essential tool for health care. A good and timely analysis of retinal vessel images has become relevant in the identification and treatment of diverse cardiovascular and ophthalmological illness. Therefore, an automatic and precise method for retinal vessel and optic disc segmentation is crucial for illness detection. This task is arduous, time-consuming, and generally developed by an expert with a considerable grade of professional skills in the field. Various retinal vessel segmentation approaches have been developed with promissory results. Although, most of such methods present a deficient performance principally due to the complex structure of vessels in retinal images. In this work, an accurate and hybrid methodology for retinal vessel and optic disc segmentation is presented. The method proposed a fusion of two different schemas: the lateral inhibition (LI) and Differential Evolution (DE). LI is used to improve the contrast between the retinal vessel and background. Followed by the minimization of the cross-entropy function to find the threshold value, these performed by the second schema the DE algorithm. To test the performance and accuracy of the proposed methodology, a set of images obtained from three public datasets STARE, DRIVE, and DRISHTI-GS have been used in different experiments. Simulation results demonstrate the high performance of the proposed approach in comparison with related methods reported in the literature.