Optical Disc and Blood Vessel Segmentation in Retinal Fundus Images

Abstract

Segmentation of optical disk (OD) and blood vessel is one of the significant steps in automatic diabetic retinopathy (DR) detecting. In this paper, a new technique is presented for OD segmentation that depends on the histogram template matching algorithm and OD size. In addition, Kirsch method is used for Blood Vessel (BV) segmentation which is one of the popular methods in the edge detection and image processing technique. The template matching algorithm is used for finding the center of the OD. In this step, the histogram of each RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) planes are founded and then the cross-correlation is founded between the template and the original image, OD location is the point with maximum cross-correlation between them. The OD size varies according to the camera field of sight and the resolution of the original image. The rectangle size of OD is not the same for various databases, the estimated size for DRIVE, STARE, DIARTDB0, and DIARTDB1 are 80×80, 140×140, 190×190, and 190×190 respectively. After finding the OD center and rectangle size of OD, a binary mask is created with Region of Interest (ROI) for segmenting the OD. The DIARTDB0 is used to evaluate the proposed technique, the result is robust and vital with an accuracy of 96%.