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Retinal vessel extraction using dynamic multi-scale matched filtering and dynamic threshold processing based on histogram fitting

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A Correction to this article was published on 15 March 2019

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Abstract

Automatic extraction of retinal vessels is of great significance in the field of medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, extracting vessels in retinal images with uneven background is a challenging task. In addition, accurate extraction of vessels with different widths is difficult. Aiming at these problems, in this paper, a new dynamic multi-scale filtering method together with a dynamic threshold processing scheme was proposed. The image is first divided into sub-images to facilitate the analysis of gray features. Then for each sub-image, the scales of the matched filter and the segmentation threshold are dynamically determined in accordance with the Gaussian fitting results of the gray distribution. Compared with the current blood vessel extraction algorithms based on multi-scale matched filter using uniform scales for the whole retinal image, the proposed method detects many fine vessels drowned by noise and avoids an overestimation of the thin vessels while improving the accuracy of segmentation in general.

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Change history

  • 15 March 2019

    In the affiliation of the first author, Shandong University was omitted by mistake.

  • 15 March 2019

    In the affiliation of the first author, Shandong University was omitted by mistake.

  • 15 March 2019

    In the affiliation of the first author, Shandong University was omitted by mistake.

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Correspondence to Ying Wei.

Additional information

The paper was first submitted on May 22, 2017, for review.

This work was supported by Agricultural science and Technology Achievements Transformation Fund Ministry of Science and Technology, China and partially supported by a Grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China. (Reference No.: UGC/FDS13/E04/14).

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Gou, D., Wei, Y., Fu, H. et al. Retinal vessel extraction using dynamic multi-scale matched filtering and dynamic threshold processing based on histogram fitting. Machine Vision and Applications 29, 655–666 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-018-0924-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-018-0924-0

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