Using retinex image enhancement to improve the artery/vein classification in retinal images

  • Authors:
  • S. G. Vázquez;N. Barreira;M. G. Penedo;M. Saez;A. Pose-Reino

  • Affiliations:
  • Varpa Group, Department of Computer Science, University of A Coruña, Spain;Varpa Group, Department of Computer Science, University of A Coruña, Spain;Varpa Group, Department of Computer Science, University of A Coruña, Spain;GRECS Group, Department of Economics, University of Girona, Spain;Service of Internal Medicine, Hospital de Conxo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

  • Venue:
  • ICIAR'10 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Image Analysis and Recognition - Volume Part II
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

A precise characterization of the retinal vessels into veins and arteries is necessary to develop automatic tools for diagnosis support. As medical experts, most of the existing methods use the vessel lightness or color for the classification, since veins are darker than arteries. However, retinal images often suffer from inhomogeneity problems in lightness and contrast, mainly due to the image capturing process and the curved retina surface. This fact and the similarity between both types of vessels make difficult an accurate classification, even for medical experts. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for the retinal vessel classification that combines an image enhancement procedure based on the retinex theory and a clustering process performed in several overlapped areas within the retinal image. Experimental results prove the accuracy of our approach in terms of miss-classified and unclassified vessels.