International Journal of Engineering and Techniques - Volume 2 Issue 2, Mar Apr 2016

RESEARCH ARTICLE

OPEN ACCESS

Segmentation of Blood Vessels and Optic Disc in

Fundus Images
1

M. Dhivya, 2P. Jenifer, 3D. C. Joy Winnie Wise, 4N. Rajapriya,

Department of CSE, Francis Xavier Engineering College, Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, India

Abstract:
Diabetic retinopathy also known as diabetic eye disease, is when damage occurs to the retina
due to diabetes. It can eventually lead to blindness. By analyzing and detecting vasculature structures
in retinal image the diabetes can be detected in advanced stages by comparing its states of retinal
blood vessels. In blood vessel classification approach computer based retinal image analysis can be
used to extract the retinal image vessels. Stationary wavelet transform (SWT) are used to extract the
features from the fundus image and classification can be performed using Support Vector
Machine(SVM). SVM has become an essential machine learning method for the detection and
classification of particular patterns in medical images. It is used in a wide range of applications for its
ability to detect patterns in experimental databases. If the vessels are present, then it is extracted by
using segmentation. Mathematical morphology and K-means clustering is used to segment the vessels.
To enhance the blood vessels and suppress the background information, smoothing operation can be
performed on the retinal image using mathematical morphology. Then the enhanced image is
segmented using K-means clustering algorithm to detect the diseases easily.
Keywords Vasculature, Vessel Segmentation, Mathematical Morphology, Clustering, Dilation,

Erosion, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Stationary Wavelet Transform(SWT).

I.

INTRODUCTION

Manipulating data in the form of an

image through several possible techniques.
An image is usually interpreted as a twodimensional array of brightness values,
and is most familiarly represented by such
patterns as those of a photographic print,
slide, television screen, or movie screen.
An image can be process adoptically or
digitally with a computer.
To digitally
process an image, it is first necessary to
reduce the image to a series of numbers
that can be manipulated by the computer.
Each number representing the brightness
value of the image at a particular location
is called a picture element, or pixel. A

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typical digitized image may have 512

512 or roughly 250,000 pixels, although
much larger images are becoming common.
Once the image has been digitized, there
are three basic operations that can be
performed on it in the computer. For a
point operation, a pixel value in the output
image depends on a single pixel value in
the input image. For local operations,
several neighbouring pixels in the input
image determine the value of an output
image pixel. In a global operation, all of
the input image pixels contribute to an
output image pixel value.

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International Journal of Engineering and Techniques - Volume 2 Issue 2, Mar Apr 2016

These operations, taken singly or in

combination, are the means by which the
image is enhanced, restored, or
compressed. An image is enhanced when it
is modified so that the information it
contains is more clearly evident, but
enhancement can also include making the
image more visually appealing. An
example is noise smoothing. To smooth
a noisy image, median filtering can be
applied with a 3 3 pixel window. This
means that the value of every pixel in the
noisy image is recorded, along with the
values of its nearest eight neighbors. These
nine numbers are then ordered according
to size, and the median is selected as the
value for the pixel in the new image. As
the 3 3 window is moved one pixel at a
time across the noisy image, the filtered
image is formed. Another example of
enhancement is contrast manipulation,
where each pixel's value in the new image
depends solely on that pixel's value in the
old image; in other words, this is a point
operation. Contrast manipulation is
commonly performed by adjusting the
brightness and contrast controls on a
television set, or by controlling the
exposure
and
development
time
in printmaking. Another point operation is
that of pseudo coloring a black-and-white
image, by assigning arbitrary colors to the
gray levels. This technique is popular
in thermography, where hotter objects are
assigned one color and cool objects are
assigned another color with other colors
assigned to intermediate values.
The aim of restoration is also to
improve
the
image,
but
unlike
enhancement, knowledge of how the
image was formed is used in an attempt to
retrieve the ideal image. Any imageforming system is not perfect, and will
introduce artifacts into the final image that
would not be present in an ideal image. A

point spread function, called a filter, can

be constructed that undoes the blurring. By
imaging the blurred image with the filter
point spread function, the restored image
results.
The filter point spread function is
spread out more than the blurring point
spread function, bringing more pixels into
the averaging process. This is an example
of a global operation, since perhaps all of
the pixels of the blurred image can
contribute to the value of a single pixel in
the restored image. This type of deblurring
is called inverse filtering, and is sensitive
to the presence of noise in the blurred
image. By modifying the deblurring filter
according to the properties of the noise,
performance
can
be
improved. Compression is a way of
representing an image by fewer numbers,
at
the
same
time
minimizing
the degradation of
the
information
contained in the image.
Compression is important because of
the large quantities of digital imagery that
are sent electronically and stored. Digital
high-definition television relies heavily on
image compression to enable transmission
and display of large-format color images.
Fig. 1 shows the architecture of image
processing system which performs image
acquisition,
storage,
preprocessing,
segmentation, representation, recognition,
interpretation and finally displays or
records the resulting image.
DIGITIZER

IMAGE
PROCESSOR

MASS STORAGE

DIGITAL
COMPUTER

DISPLAY

OPERATOR
CONSOLE

HARD COPY
DEVICE

Fig. 1 Image Processing System

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International Journal of Engineering and Techniques - Volume 2 Issue 2, Mar Apr 2016

A digitizer converts an image into a

numerical representation suitable for input
into a digital computer. An image
processor does the functions of image
acquisition, storage,
preprocessing,
segmentation, representation, recognition,
interpretation and finally
displays or
records the resulting image. Mathematical
processing of the digitized image such as
convolution,
averaging,
addition,
subtraction, etc. are done by the computer.
A digital computer is the most commonly
used type of computer and is used to
process information with quantities using
digits, usually using the binary number
system. An example of a digital computer
is a MacBook.
The secondary storage devices
normally used are floppy disks, CD
In [1] Abrmoff .D.M, Garvin .K.M,
and Sonka .M proposes a new methods for
2-D fundus imaging and techniques for 3D optical coherence tomography (OCT)
imaging are reviewed. Special attention is
given to quantitative techniques for
analysis of fundus photographs with a
focus on clinically relevant assessment of
retinal vasculature, identification of retinal
lesions, assessment of optic nerve head
(ONH) shape, building retinal atlases, and
to automated methods for population
screening for retinal diseases. The aspects
of image acquisition, image analysis, and
clinical relevance are treated.
In [2] Fraz .M, Remagnino .P,
Hoppe .A, Uyyanonvara .B, Rudnicka .A,
Owen .C, and Barman .S presented an
ensemble system of bagged and boosted
decision trees and utilizes a feature vector
based on the orientation analysis of
gradient vector field, morphological
transformation, line strength measures, and
Gabor filter responses. The feature vector
encodes information to handle the healthy
as well as the pathological retinal image.
The performance of the ensemble system
evaluated in detail and the incurred
accuracy, robustness, and simplicity make
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ROMs etc. It refers to storage of large

amount data in a persisting machine
readable fashion. Modern mass storage
devices include all types of disk drives
and tape drives. The hard copy device is
used to produce a permanent copy of the
image for the storage of the software
involve. A hard copy is a printed copy of
information from a computer. The
operator console consists of equipment
and arrangements for verification of
intermediate results and for alteration in
the software as and when require. The
operator is also capable of checking for
any resulting errors and for the entry of
requisites data.
II.
RELATED WORKS

the algorithm a suitable tool for automated

retinal image analysis.
In [3] Goatman .K, Fleming .A,
Philip .S, Williams .G, Olson .J, and
Sharp .P proposes a new construction for
Proliferative diabetic retinopathy and
characterized by the development of
abnormal new retinal vessels. A method
for automatically detecting new vessels on
the optic discussing retinal photography.
Vessel-like candidate segments are first
detected using watershed lines and ridge
strength measurement. Fifteen feature
parameters, associated with shape, position,
orientation, brightness, contrast and line
density are calculated for each candidate
segment. Based on these features, each
segment is categorized as normal or
abnormal using a support vector machine
(SVM) classifier. The system was trained
and tested by cross- validation. It is a rare
condition likely to lead to severe visual
impairment.
In [4] Kochkorov .A, Gugleta .A,
Zawinka .C, Katamay .R, Flammer .J, and
Orgul .S presented a newly supervised
method for blood vessel detection in
digital retinal images. Its effectiveness and
robustness with different image conditions,
together with its simplicity and fast

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International Journal of Engineering and Techniques - Volume 2 Issue 2, Mar Apr 2016

implementation, make this blood vessel

segmentation proposal suitable for retinal
image computer analyses such as
automated screening for early diabetic
retinopathy detection.
In
[5]
Roychowdhury .S,
Koozekanani .D, and Parhi .K presented
fundus images for analyzing fields of view,
and generates a severity grade for diabetic
retinopathy
using machine learning.
Classifiers such as the Gaussian Mixture
model (GMM), k-nearest neighbor (kNN),
support vector machine (SVM), and Ada
Boost are analyzed for classifying
retinopathy lesions from non lesions.
GMM and kNN classifiers are found to be
the best classifiers for bright and red lesion
classification, respectively. A main
contribution are reducing the number of
features used for lesion classification by
feature ranking.
In [6]
Marin .D, Aquino .A,
Gegundez-Arias .M, and Bravo .J
presented a neural network (NN) scheme
for pixel classification and computes a 7-D
vector composed of gray-level and
moment invariants-based features for pixel
representation. Method performance on
both sets of test images are better than
other existing solutions in literature. The
method proves especially accurate for
vessel detection in stare images. Its
effectiveness and robustness with different
image conditions, together with its
simplicity and fast implementation, make
blood vessel segmentation proposal
suitable for retinal image computer
analyses such as automated screening for
early diabetic retinopathy detection
In [7] Miri .M, and Mahloojifar .A
proposes a new algorithm to detect the
retinal blood vessels effectively. Due to
the high ability of the curvelet transform in
representing the edges, modification of
curvelet transform coefficients to enhance
the retinal image edges better prepares the
image for the segmentation part. The
directionality feature of the multi structure
elements method makes it an effective tool
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in edge detection. Hence, morphology

operators using multi structure elements
are applied to the enhanced image in order
to find the retinal image ridges. In order to
increase
the
efficiency
of
the
morphological operators by reconstruction,
they were applied using multi structure
elements and the image decomposed to
several blocks. In order to utilize cca more
efficiently and locally applied the cca and
length filtering instead of considering the
whole image.
The existing system is a Gaussian Mixture
Model (GMM) are parametric probability
density function represented as a weighted
sum of Gaussian component densities.
GMMs are commonly used as a parametric
model of the probability distribution of
continuous measure mentsor features in a
biometric system, such as vocal-tract
related spectral features in a speaker
recognition system.GMM parameters are
estimated from training data using the
iterative
Expectation-Maximization
algorithm or Maximum A Posteriori
estimation from a well-trained prior model.
Algorithm for mixtures of Gaussians in
that they both attempt to find the centers of
natural clusters in the data. A Gaussian
Mixture Model that assumes all the data
points are generated from a mixture of a
finite number of Gaussian distributions
with unknown parameters. Mixture model
should not confused with compositional
data. The main difficulty in learning
Gaussian mixture models from unlabeled
data is that it is one usually doesnt know
which points came from which latent
component (if one has access to this
information it gets very easy to fit a
separate Gaussian distribution to each set
of points). Expectation-maximization is a
well-founded statistical algorithm to get
around this problem by an iterative process.
First one assumes random components
(randomly centered on data points, learned
from k-means, or even just normally
distributed around the origin) and
computes for each point a probability of

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International Journal of Engineering and Techniques - Volume 2 Issue 2, Mar Apr 2016

being generated by each component of the

model. Then, one tweaks the parameters to
maximize the likelihood of the data given
those assignments. Repeating this process
is guaranteed to always converge to a local
optimum.

III. IMAGE SEGMENTATION

Retinal images are influenced by all
the factors that affect the body vasculature
in general. The human eye is a unique
region of the human body where the
vascular condition can be directly
observed. In addition to fovea and optic
disc, the blood vessels contributes one of
the main features of an retinal fundus
image and several of its properties are
noticeably affected by worldwide major
diseases such as diabetes, hypertension,
and arteriosclerosis. Further, certain eye
diseases
such
as
choroidal
neovascularization and retinal artery
occlusion also make changes in the retinal
vasculature. It provide better edge
detection and texture representation.

Input
Image

Pre
Processi
ng

Databas
e Images

SWT
Feature
Extracti
on

Feature
Extracti
on

SVM
Classifie
r

Segmenta
tion

If
vessels
detected

Fig. 2 System design represents Blood

vessel Segmentation in fundus images .
Classification and anatomical structure
analysis are proposed based on
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Morphological Operations and K-Means

Clustering.
A. Preprocessing
Preprocessing is done to extract the
region of interest (ROI). Cutting or
cropping out the region that contains the
retinal image feature minimizes the
number of operations on the retinal image.
In this method, the color scale RGB
images are first converted into grayscale
for efficient computation. Since the
exudates are visible with more contrast in
grayscale an equalization procedure was
performed on the images to obtain a local
contrast i,e approximately, equal at all
image intensities. Stationary wavelet
transform (SWT) are used to extract the
features from the fundus image and
classification can be performed using
Support Vector Machine(SVM). SVM has
become an essential machine learning
method for the detection and classification
of particular patterns in medical images. It
is used in a wide range of applications for
its ability to detect
patterns in
experimental databases. If the vessels are
present, then it is extracted by using
segmentation.
B. Morphological Operation
The morphological operations are
applied on the pre processed green
channel.
Morphological
operation
processes the preprocessed image with
structuring element. The retinal blood
vessels are detected by applying dilation
and erosion process to a preprocessed
image. The morphological opening and
closing operation are applied to an image
based on multi structure elements to
enhance the vessel edges. Morphological
opening and closing operation is
performed by using dilation and erosion.
MM was originally developed for binary
images, and was later extended to
grayscale functions and images. The
subsequent generalization to complete
lattices is widely accepted today as MM's
theoretical foundation.

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converge, but it may not return the

optimal solution. The quality of the
solution depends on the initial set
of clusters and the value of K
Fig. 3 Image Dilation And Erosion
The morphologically processed
opened image and morphologically
processed closed images are absolutely
subtracted to detect the blood vessels from
retina fundus image. The combination of
dilation and erosion operations is
performed on image with different
structuring element of radius 3. Then, an
absolute difference mapping image is
formed by absolute subtraction of retinal
image from the morphologically processed
In the
sub-band image.
morphological dilation and erosion
operations, the state of any given pixel in
the output image is determined by
applying a rule to the corresponding pixel
and its neighbors in the input image. The
rule used to process the pixels defines the
operation as a dilation or an erosion It is a
matrix containing 1s and 0s where 1s
are called neighborhood pixels.

IV RESULT
For every color fundus photography, the
vessel
segmentation
algorithm
is
performed in three stages and tested with
following datasets that have been manually
annotated for blood vessel regions. The
first stage binary images are obtained in
fig 4.

C. K-Means Clustering Method

The K-means algorithm is an
iterative technique that is used to partition
an image into K clusters. The basic
algorithm are
1. Pick K cluster centers, either
randomly or based on some
heuristic
2. Assign each pixel in the image to
the cluster that minimizes the
distance between the pixel and the
cluster center
3. Re-compute the cluster centers by
averaging all of the pixels in the
cluster
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until
convergence is attained. This
algorithm
is
guaranteed
to
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Fig. 4 Selecting The Input Image

To extract the blood vessel regions
preprocessing strategies are implemented.
Fig 5. which converts test image into
transformed image using SVM classifier.

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International Journal of Engineering and Techniques - Volume 2 Issue 2, Mar Apr 2016

diffusion filter is used to detect and

segment the optic disc from the green
channel retinal image.

Fig. 5 Transformed Image

Support vector machine (SVM) is a widely
used technique for pattern recognition and
classification in a variety of applications
for its ability for detecting patterns in
experimental databases. Figure 6. Shows
the extraction of major vessels ensures
segmentation of the first category of blood
vessels.

Fig. 6 Blood Vessel Detection

In order to detect and segment the retinal
blood vessels accurately, the optic disc
should be detected and eliminated from the
retinal image. Fig 7. Shows the anisotropic
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Fig 7. Optic Disk Detection

The blood vessel detection are major role
in screening of eye diseases. Fig 8. Shows
the detection of exudates region for
diabetic retinopathy diagnosis.

Fig 8. Exudates Region.

The result segmentation is a set of
segments that collectively cover entire
image, or a set of contours extracted from

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International Journal of Engineering and Techniques - Volume 2 Issue 2, Mar Apr 2016

the image. Fig 9. Shows the Retinopathic

analysis of diabetes and its detection.

for optic disc and the blood vessels

detections. Optic disc detection and the
blood vessels detection are the major role
in the screening of eye diseases. The
results of this work can be used in the
future processes such as the screening of
diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and so on.
The detection method doesn't need the
highly efficient computer so it is suitable
for rural area in developing countries.

REFERENCES
1. Abrmoff .M.D, Garvin .M.K, and
Sonka .M, Retinal imaging and image
analysis, IEEE Trans. Med. Imag., vol.
3, pp. 169208, Jan. 2010.

Fig 9. Segmented Output Image.

V CONCLUSION
The blood vessel detection and
segmentation is an important for diabetic
retinopathy diagnosis at earlier stage.
Stationary wavelet transform is used to
extract the features from the funds image
and classification is done by using support
vector machine. Support vector machine
(SVM) is a widely used technique for
pattern recognition and classification in a
variety of applications for its ability for
detecting
patterns
in experimental
databases. SVM has become an essential
machine learning method for the detection
and classification of particular patterns in
medical images. If the vessels are present,
then it is extracted by using segmentation.
The morphological operations and KMeans is proposed for detecting and
segmenting the blood vessels from the
retinal image. In implementation, the
preprocessing steps for retinal images are
analysed. It addressed two problems of
preprocessing of retinal images as noise
removal and background extraction.
Mathematical morphology method is used
ISSN: 2395-1303

2. Fraz .M, Remagnino .P, Hoppe .A,

Uyyanonvara .B, Rudnicka .A, Owen .C,
and
Barman .S,
An ensemble
classification-based approach applied to
retinal blood vessel segmentation, IEEE
Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 59, no. 9, pp.
25382548, Sep. 2012.

3. Goatman .K, Fleming .A, Philip .S,

Williams .G,Olson .J, and Sharp .P,
Detection of new vessels on the optic
disc using retinal photographs, IEEE
Trans. Med. Imag., vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 972
979, Apr. 2011.
4. Kochkorov .A, Gugleta .A, Zawinka .C,
Katamay .R, Flammer .J, and Orgul .S,
Short-term retinal vessel diameter
variability in relation to the history of cold
extremities, Investigative Ophthalmol.
Visual Sci., vol. 47, no. 9, pp. 40264033,
2006.

5. Roychowdhury .S, Koozekanani .D, and

Parhi .K, Dream: Diabetic retinopathy
analysis using machine learning, IEEE J.
Biomed. Health Informat., no. 99, Dec.
2013, doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2013.2294635

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International Journal of Engineering and Techniques - Volume 2 Issue 2, Mar Apr 2016

6. Marin D., Aquino A., Gegundez-Arias M.,

and Bravo J. (2011),. A new supervised
method for blood vessel segmentation in
retinal images by using gray-level and
moment invariants-based features, IEEE
Trans. Med. Imag., Vol. 30, No. 1, pp.
146158.

7. Miri M., and Mahloojifar A. (2011),.

Retinal image analysis using curvelet
transform and multistructure elements
morphology by reconstruction, IEEE
Trans. Biomed. Eng., Vol. 58, No. 5, pp.
11831192.

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