Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation with Optic Disc Pixels Exclusion

The morphological changes of retinal blood vessels are important indicators used to diagnose and monitor the progression of various diseases. A number of retinal blood vessel segmentation methods have been introduced, including the line operator based methods, which have shown satisfactory results. However, the basic line operator method cannot discriminate the pixels around the retinal optic disc, resulting in false classification of those pixels. In this paper, we integrate the detection of pixels around the retinal optic disc to the line operator method so that those pixels can be excluded from the vessel pixels. The method is evaluated on the widely used retinal dataset, the DRIVE dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has made improvements over the basic and the multi-scale line detector with accuracy and area under curve of 0.942 and 0.9521, respectively.