Automated Vessels Detection on Infant Retinal Images

Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is a common retinal neovascular disorder of premature infants. It can be characterized by inappropriate and disorganized vessel. This paper present a method for blood vessel detection on infant retinal images. The algorithm is designed to detect the retinal vessels. The proposed method applies a Lapalacian of Gaussian as a step-edge detector based on the second-order directional derivative to identify locations of the edge of vessels with zero crossings. The procedure allows parameters computation in a fixed number of operations independent of kernel size. This method is composed of four steps : grayscale conversion, edge detection based on LOG, noise removal by adaptive Wiener filter & median filter, and Otsu's global thresholding. The algorithm has been tested on twenty infant retinal images. In cooperation with the Digital Imaging Research Centre, Kingston University, London and Department of Opthalmology, Imperial College London who supplied all the images used in this project. The algorithm has done well to detect small thin vessels, which are of interest in clinical practice.