title: Automatic extraction of blood vessels in the retinal vascular tree using multiscale medialness.
abstract: We propose an algorithm for vessel extraction in retinal images. The first step consists of applying anisotropic diffusion filtering in the initial vessel network in order to restore disconnected vessel lines and eliminate noisy lines. In the second step, a multiscale line-tracking procedure allows detecting all vessels having similar dimensions at a chosen scale. Computing the individual image maps requires different steps. First, a number of points are preselected using the eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix. These points are expected to be near to a vessel axis. Then, for each preselected point, the response map is computed from gradient information of the image at the current scale. Finally, the multiscale image map is derived after combining the individual image maps at different scales (sizes). Two publicly available datasets have been used to test the performance of the suggested method. The main dataset is the STARE project's dataset and the second one is the DRIVE dataset. The experimental results, applied on the STARE dataset, show a maximum accuracy average of around 94.02%. Also, when performed on the DRIVE database, the maximum accuracy average reaches 91.55%.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Sciences, Electronics and Microelectronics Laboratory, Monastir University, 5019 Monastir, Tunisia.
authors.forename: Mariem
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-3618-211X
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ben Abdallah
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Sciences, Electronics and Microelectronics Laboratory, Monastir University, 5019 Monastir, Tunisia.
authors.forename: Jihene
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Malek
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Computers and Information, Benha University, Benha 13511, Egypt.
authors.forename: Ahmad Taher
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-7869-6373
authors.initials: AT
authors.lastname: Azar
authors.affiliation: Institute of Mines and Ales, Laboratory of Computer and Production Engineering, 30319 Alès, France.
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Montesinos
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Sciences, Electronics and Microelectronics Laboratory, Monastir University, 5019 Monastir, Tunisia.
authors.forename: Hafedh
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Belmabrouk
authors.affiliation: Imaging Technology Center (CTIM), Las Palmas-Gran Canaria University, 35017 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
authors.forename: Julio
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Esclarín Monreal
authors.affiliation: Imaging Technology Center (CTIM), Las Palmas-Gran Canaria University, 35017 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
authors.forename: Karl
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Krissian