Vessel Extraction of Retinal Images of Diabetic Retinopathy Using A Morphology-based Algorithm

Diabetes is a common disease in the world. The first member that is usually damaged is the eye. Diabetic retinopathy is a diabetic disorder and occurs due to changes in the blood vessels of the retina. Extracting blood vessels is initial step for diagnosis of retina problems. Imaging of Retina needs some special cameras called fundus. It is a digital camera that captures retina images ad is capable to save them. The purpose of this paper is to provide a method for the diagnosis of blood vessels based on morphology on retina images. After converting a color image to a gray scale one and improving the quality, morphological operators are used to remove the optical disk from the image. Then, blood vessels are extracted from the retina image by two different methods. Combining these two methods gives more detailed results. Possible noise is then removed using median filters. Finally, the results are combined and the blood vessels are extracted. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated over the images from the Drive database. The experimental results shows the effectiveness of our proposed method. The average result of specificity, sensitivity and accuracy are 0.98, 0.751 and 0.960, respectively.