title: Retinal blood vessel segmentation using line operators and support vector classification.
abstract: In the framework of computer-aided diagnosis of eye diseases, retinal vessel segmentation based on line operators is proposed. A line detector, previously used in mammography, is applied to the green channel of the retinal image. It is based on the evaluation of the average grey level along lines of fixed length passing through the target pixel at different orientations. Two segmentation methods are considered. The first uses the basic line detector whose response is thresholded to obtain unsupervised pixel classification. As a further development, we employ two orthogonal line detectors along with the grey level of the target pixel to construct a feature vector for supervised classification using a support vector machine. The effectiveness of both methods is demonstrated through receiver operating characteristic analysis on two publicly available databases of color fundus images.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, University of Perugia, I-06125 Perugia, Italy.
authors.forename: Elisa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ricci
authors.forename: Renzo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Perfetti
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012171:Retinal Vessels / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D042262:Retinoscopy / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity