BLOOD VESSELS EXTRACTION USING MATHEMATICAL MORPHOLOGY

Abstract

The retinal vasculature is composed of the arteries and veins with their tributaries which are visible within the retinal image. The segmentation and measurement of the retinal vasculature is of primary interest in the diagnosis and treatment of a number of systemic and ophthalmologic conditions. The accurate segmentation of the retinal blood vessels is often an essential prerequisite step in the identification of retinal anatomy and pathology. In this study, we present an automated approach for blood vessels extraction using mathematical morphology. Two main steps are involved: enhancement operation is applied to the original retinal image in order to remove the noise and increase contrast of retinal blood vessels and morphology operations are employed to extract retinal blood vessels. This operation of segmentation is applied to binary image of top-hat transformation. The result was compared with other algorithms and give better results.