An adaptive region growing segmentation for blood vessel detection from retinal images

Blood vessel segmentation from the retinal images is extremely important for assessing retinal abnormalities. A good amount of research has been reported on blood vessel segmentation, but significant improvement is still a necessity particularly on minor vessel segmentation. As the local contrast of blood vessels is unstable (intensity variation), especially in unhealthy retinal images, it becomes very complicated to detect the vessels from the retinal images. In this paper, we propose an edge based vessel segmentation technique to overcome the problem of large intensity variation between major and minor vessels. The edge is detected by considering the adaptive value of gradient employing Region Growing Algorithm, from where parallel edges are computed to select vessels. Our proposed method is efficient and shows a very good performance in blood vessel detection including minor vessels. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx