DETERMINATION OF RETINAL NETWORK SKELETON THROUGH MATHEMATICAL MORPHOLOGY

Sandra Morales (1) , Valery Naranjo (1) , Jesus Angulo (2) , Fernando López-Mir (1) , Mariano Alcañiz (1)

1 UPV - Universitat Politècnica de València
2 CMM - Centre de Morphologie Mathématique

This paper describes a new approach to determine vas-cular skeleton in retinal images. This approach is based on mathematical morphology along with curvature evaluation. In particular, a variant of the watershed transformation, the stochastic watershed, is applied to extract the vessel center-line. Its goal is to obtain directly the skeleton of the retinal tree avoiding a previous stage of vessel segmentation in order to reduce the dependence between stages and the computational cost. Experimental results show qualitative improvements if the proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms, above all on pathological images. Therefore , the result of this work is an efficient and effective vessel centerline extraction algorithm and can be useful for further applications and image-aided diagnosis systems.

Mots clés: Retinal vascular skeleton; vessel centerline; stochastic watershed; mathematical morphology; curvature evaluation

Domaines: Traitement des images [eess.IV]

Sandra Morales, Valery Naranjo, Jesus Angulo, Fernando López-Mir, Mariano Alcañiz. DETERMINATION OF RETINAL NETWORK SKELETON THROUGH MATHEMATICAL MORPHOLOGY. 22nd European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO'2014), Sep 2014, Lisbon, Portugal. ⟨hal-01536379⟩