A Hybrid Unsupervised Approach for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Retinal vessel segmentation (RVS) is a significant source of useful information for monitoring, identification, initial medication, and surgical development of ophthalmic disorders. Most common disorders, i.e., stroke, diabetic retinopathy (DR), and cardiac diseases, often change the normal structure of the retinal vascular network. A lot of research has been committed to building an automatic RVS system. But, it is still an open issue. In this article, a framework is recommended for RVS with fast execution and competing outcomes. An initial binary image is obtained by the application of the MISODATA on the preprocessed image. For vessel structure enhancement, B-COSFIRE filters are utilized along with thresholding to obtain another binary image. These two binary images are combined by logical AND-type operation. Then, it is fused with the enhanced image of B-COSFIRE filters followed by thresholding to obtain the vessel location map (VLM). The methodology is verified on four different datasets: DRIVE, STARE, HRF, and CHASE_DB1, which are publicly accessible for benchmarking and validation. The obtained results are compared with the existing competing methods.