Microscopic retinal blood vessels detection and segmentation using support vector machine and K-nearest neighbors

Abstract

The retina is the deepest layer of texture covering the rear of the eye, recorded by fundus images. Vessel detection and segmentation are useful in disease diagnosis. The retina's blood vessels could help diagnose maladies such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and blood pressure. A mix of supervised and unsupervised strategies exists for the detection and segmentation of blood vessels images. The tree structure of retinal blood vessels, their random area, and different thickness have caused vessel detection difficulties at machine learning calculations. Since the green band of retinal images conveys more information about the vessels, they are utilized for microscopic vessels detection. The current research proposes an administered calculation for segmentation of retinal vessels, where two upgrading stages depending on filtering and comparative histogram were applied after pre-processing and image quality improvement. At that point, statistical features of vessel tracking, maximum curvature and curvelet coefficient are extracted for each pixel. The extracted features are classified by support vector machine and the k-nearest neighbors. The morphological operators then enhance the classified image at the final stage to segment with higher accuracy. The dice coefficient is utilized for the evaluation of the proposed method. The proposed approach is concluded to be better than different strategies with a normal of 92.