Retinal blood vessel segmentation via graph cut

Abstract

Image analysis is becoming increasingly prominent as a non intrusive diagnosis in modern ophthalmology. Blood vessel morphology is an important indicator for diseases like diabetes, hypertension and retinopathy. This paper presents an automated and unsupervised method for retinal blood vessels segmentation using the graph cut technique. The graph is constructed using a rough segmentation from a pre-processed image together with spatial pixel connection. The proposed method was tested on two public datasets and compared with other methods. Experimental results show that this method outperforms other unsupervised methods and demonstrate the competitiveness with supervised methods. ©2010 IEEE.