Supervised Segmentation of Retinal Vessel Structures Using ANN

Abstract

In this study, a supervised retina blood vessel segmentation process was performed on the green channel of the RGB image using artificial neural network (ANN). The green channel is preferred because the retinal vessel structures can be distinguished most clearly from the green channel of the RGB image. The study was performed using 20 images in the DRIVE data set which is one of the most common retina data sets known. The images went through some preprocessing stages like contrastlimited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), color intensity adjustment, morphological operations and median and Gaussian filtering to obtain a good segmentation. Retinal vessel structures were highlighted with top-hat and bot-hat morphological operations and converted to binary image by using global thresholding. Then, the network was trained by the binary version of the images specified as training images in the dataset and the targets are the images segmented manually by a specialist. The average segmentation accuracy for 20 images was found as 0.9492.