Retinal vessel segmentation using minimum spanning superpixel tree detector

Bin Sheng, Ping Li, Shuangjia Mo, Huating Li, Xuhong Hou, Qiang Wu, Jing Qin, Ruogu Fang, David Dagan Feng

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

54 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The retinal vessel is one of the determining factors in an ophthalmic examination. Automatic extraction of retinal vessels from low-quality retinal images still remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a robust and effective approach that qualitatively improves the detection of low-contrast and narrow vessels. Rather than using the pixel grid, we use a superpixel as the elementary unit of our vessel segmentation scheme. We regularize this scheme by combining the geometrical structure, texture, color, and space information in the superpixel graph. And the segmentation results are then refined by employing the efficient minimum spanning superpixel tree to detect and capture both global and local structure of the retinal images. Such an effective and structure-aware tree detector significantly improves the detection around the pathologic area. Experimental results have shown that the proposed technique achieves advantageous connectivity-area-length (CAL) scores of 80.92% and 69.06% on two public datasets, namely, DRIVE and STARE, thereby outperforming state-of-the-art segmentation methods. In addition, the tests on the challenging retinal image database have further demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. Our approach achieves satisfactory segmentation performance in comparison with state-of-the-art methods. Our technique provides an automated method for effectively extracting the vessel from fundus images.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8362709
Pages (from-to)2707-2719
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
Volume49
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2019

Keywords

  • Feature extraction
  • minimum spanning superpixel tree (MSST)
  • retinal image
  • superpixel
  • vessel segmentation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Retinal vessel segmentation using minimum spanning superpixel tree detector'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this