Selective Search and Intensity Context Based Retina Vessel Image Segmentation

In the framework of computer-aided diagnosis of eye disease, a new contextual image feature named influence degree of average intensity is proposed for retinal vessel image segmentation. This new feature evaluates the influence degree of current detected pixel decreasing the average intensity of the local row where that pixel located. Firstly, Hessian matrix is introduced to detect candidate regions, for the reason of accelerating segmentation. Then, the influence degree of average intensity of each pixel is extracted. Next, contextual feature vector for each pixel is constructed by concatenating the 8 feature neighbors. Finally, a classifier is built to classify each pixel into vessel or non-vessel based on its contextual feature. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through receiver operating characteristic analysis on the benchmarked databases of DRIVE and STARE. Experiment results show that our method is comparable with the state-of-the-art methods. For example, the average accuracy, sensitivity, specificity achieved on the database DRIVE and STARE are 0.9611, 0.8174, 0.9747 and 0.9547, 0.7768, 0.9751, respectively.