Automatic Extraction of Blood Vessels, Bifurcations and End Points in the Retinal Vascular Tree

In this paper we present an effective algorithm for automated extraction of the vascular tree in retinal images, including bifurcations, crossovers and end-points detection. Correct identification of these features in the ocular fundus helps the diagnosis of important systematic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension. The pre-processing consists in artefacts removal based on anisotropic diffusion filter. Then a matched filter is applied to enhance blood vessels. The filter uses a full adaptive kernel because each vessel has a proper orientation and thickness. The kernel of the filter needs to be rotated for all possible directions. As a consequence, a suitable kernel has been designed …