Non-Compactness Attribute Filtering to Extract Retinal Blood Vessels in Fundus Images

Retinal blood vessels can give information about abnormalities or disease by examining its pathological changes. One abnormality is diabetic retinopathy, characterized by a disorder of retinal blood vessels resulting from diabetes mellitus. Currently, diabetic retinopathy is one of the major causes of human vision abnormalities and blindness. Hence, early detection can lead to proper treatment, and segmentation of the abnormality provides a map of retinal vessels that can facilitate the assessment of the characteristics of these vessels. In this paper, the authors propose a new method, consisting of a sequence of procedures, to segment blood vessels in a retinal image. In the method, attribute filtering with a so-called Max-Tree is used to represent the image based on its gray value. The filtering process is done using the branches filtering approach in which the tree branches are selected based on the non-compactness of the nodes. The selection is started from the leaves. This experiment was performed on 40 retinal images, and utilized the manual segmentation created by an observer to validate the results. The proposed method can deliver an average accuracy of 94.21%.