@article{337a666faf954901874c87e48e030306,
title = "Retinal vessels segmentation based on level set and region growing",
abstract = "Retinal vessels play an important role in the diagnostic procedure of retinopathy. Accurate segmentation of retinal vessels is crucial for pathological analysis. In this paper, we propose a new retinal vessel segmentation method based on level set and region growing. Firstly, a retinal vessel image is preprocessed by the contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization and a 2D Gabor wavelet to enhance the vessels. Then, an anisotropic diffusion filter is used to smooth the image and preserve vessel boundaries. Finally, the region growing method and a region-based active contour model with level set implementation are applied to extract retinal vessels, and their results are combined to achieve the final segmentation. Comparisons are conducted on the publicly available DRIVE and STARE databases using three different measurements. Experimental results show that the proposed method reaches an average accuracy of 94.77% on the DRIVE database and 95.09% on the STARE database.",
keywords = "2D Gabor wavelet, Level set, Region growing, Retinal vessel segmentation",
author = "{Qian Zhao}, Yu and {Hong Wang}, Xiao and {Fang Wang}, Xiao and Shih, {Frank Y.}",
note = "Funding Information: This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 61172184 , 61379107 and 81171420 ), Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 12JJ6062 ), Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of Education Ministry in China (Grant no. NCET-13-0603 ), Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education in China (Grant no. 20130162110016 ), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant no. 2012M521554 ). The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. Funding Information: Frank Y. Shih received B.S. from National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, in 1980, M.S. from State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA, in 1983, and Ph.D. from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, in 1987. He is presently a professor jointly appointed in the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ. He is also Director of Computer Vision Laboratory. He held a visiting professor position at Princeton University, Columbia University, National Taiwan University, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Conservatoire National Des Arts Et Metiers, Paris, and Central South University, Changsha, China. He is an internationally renowned scholar and serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Multimedia Intelligence and Security (IJMIS). He is currently on the editorial board of Pattern Recognition, Pattern Recognition Letters, the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing, Recent Patents on Engineering, Recent Patents on Computer Science, The Open Nanoscience Journal, the International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology, the Journal of Internet Technology, ISRN Signal Processing, and ISRN Machine Vision. He served as a steering member, committee member, and session chair for numerous professional conferences and workshops. He has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, Navy and Air Force, and Industry. He is the recipient of Research Initiation Award of NSF in 1991 and Board of Overseers Excellence in Research Award of NJIT in 2009. ",
year = "2014",
month = jul,
doi = "10.1016/j.patcog.2014.01.006",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "47",
pages = "2437--2446",
journal = "Pattern Recognition",
issn = "0031-3203",
publisher = "Elsevier Limited",
number = "7",
}