Abstract
Blood vessels in retinal fundus image are the only vessels which we can observe directly from outside human body. Therefore, funduscopy is employed in the complete physical examination for the early detection of hypertension and arteriosclerosis. With the increase of the number of examinees in recent years, it is increasing the burden of the doctor's image interpretations. To support their image interpretations, several computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) schemes have been developed. In the CAD schemes, vessel extraction method in retinal fundus images is an essential component. In this paper, we proposed a new method for extracting blood vessels in retinal fundus images, which combines morphology filter bank and AdaBoost. The morphology filter bank was used for extracting line patterns in the determination of the initial candidates of blood vessels. The AdaBoost is employed for eliminating false positives in the initial candidates. We evaluated our proposed method by using training and testing datasets in DRIVE database. The result indicated that sensitivity was 0.7362 and specificity was 0.9714. Our propose method is useful for the extraction of vessels in retinal fundus images.
