Automatic Detection of Blood Vessel in Retinal Images

Automatic detection of retinal blood vessels and measurement of vessel diameter are very much important for the diagnosis and the treatment of different ocular diseases including diabetic retinopathy (DR), glaucoma and hypertension. In this paper, we present a novel method to detect blood vessels in the fundus retinal images. The proposed method consists of three main steps. The first step is pre-processing of retinal image to improve the retinal images by evaluation of several image enhancement techniques. In the second step, the vesselness filter is usually used to enhance the blood vessels. Finally Hessian multiscale enhancement filter is designed from the adaptive thresholding of the output of the vesselness filter for vessels detection. The performance of algorithms is compared and analyzed on three publicly available databases (DRIVE, STARE and CHASE_DB) of retinal images using a number of measures, which include accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.