Extraction of Retinal Vasculature using Optimization Methods

A healthy retina is required for proper vision but it is difficult to identify the retinal diseases in the first stage. Several retinal diseases affect the eye such as retinal tear, detachment of retina, glaucoma, macular hole and macular degeneration etc. Since most of these diseases have an effect on the blood vessels within the eye, analyzing the structure and variation in feature of retinal blood vessels help in identifying the disease and its severity. In this paper, we are extracting the blood vessels from retinal fundus image using Tsallis entropy principle and bacterial foraging algorithm. The retinal images are obtained from red-free fundus photography. The performance of this algorithm is compared and analyzed with ground-truth images of DRIVE database.