Vessel Extraction on Ocular Fundus Images by Using Gabor Filter Bank

Fundus diagnosis is an important part of the whole body examination that may provide rich clinical information to doctors for diagnostic reference. Manual fundus vessel extraction is helpful to quantitative measurement of diseases but obviously it is a tough work for physicians. This paper presents an automatic method by using Gabor filter bank to extract the artery and vein separately in the ocular fundus images. After preprocessing steps that include gray-scale transform, gray value inversion and contrast enhancement, the Gabor filter bank is applied to the extraction of the artery and vein in the ocular fundus images. Finally these two different width types of vessels are selected by post-processing methods such as labeling, corrosion, binarization, etc. Evaluation results show an accurate rate of 90% in vein and 82% in artery from 20 cases, that indicates the effectiveness of our proposed segmentation method.