Abstract
The specification of blood vessel region in the retinal fundus images is one of the important basic technologies in the development of the computer-aided diagnosis systems for funduscopy. In this report, a new blood vessel region extraction method based on the black-top-hat transformation (BTH), which is one of morphological operations, is proposed. In the proposed method, firstly, BTHs with two structuring elements having different radii are applied to the retinal fundus image in parallel. Then the binarization is achieved for the transformed images and tentative blood vessel regions are extracted by using binarized images. Consequently, the final blood regions are determined by correcting the images, which are obtained after synthesizing complementary tentative images. In this study, the experiments using some practical retinal fundus images were executed, and the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by detection rate of the blood vessels. From the experimental results, it can be said that the proposed method is effective for the blood vessel region extraction from the retinal fundus images.
