• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.11
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• pp.2702-2719
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• 2013

A new optimal scheme based on curvelet transform is proposed for retinal image enhancement (RIE) using real-coded quantum genetic algorithm. Curvelet transform has better performance in representing edges than classical wavelet transform for its anisotropy and directional decomposition capabilities. For more precise reconstruction and better visualization, curvelet coefficients in corresponding subbands are modified by using a nonlinear enhancement mapping function. An automatic method is presented for selecting optimal parameter settings of the nonlinear mapping function via quantum genetic search strategy. The performance measures used in this paper provide some quantitative comparison among different RIE methods. The proposed method is tested on the DRIVE and STARE retinal databases and compared with some popular image enhancement methods. The experimental results demonstrate that proposed method can provide superior enhanced retinal image in terms of several image quantitative evaluation indexes.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.27-32
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• 2006

We present an effective algorithm for automatic tracing of retinal vessel structure and vascular landmark extraction of bifurcations and ending points. In this paper we deal with vascular patterns from RGB images for personal identification. Vessel tracing algorithms are of interest in a variety of biometric and medical application such as personal identification, biometrics, and ophthalmic disorders like vessel change detection. However eye surface vasculature tracing in RGB images has many problems which are subject to improper illumination, glare, fade-out, shadow and artifacts arising from reflection, refraction, and dispersion. The proposed algorithm on vascular tracing employs multi-stage processing of ten-layers as followings: Image Acquisition, Image Enhancement by gray scale retinal image enhancement, reducing background artifact and illuminations and removing interlacing minute characteristics of vessels, Vascular Structure Extraction by connecting broken vessels, extracting vascular structure using eight directional information, and extracting retinal vascular structure, and Vascular Landmark Extraction by extracting bifurcations and ending points. The results of automatic retinal vessel extraction using jive different thresholds applied 34 eye images are presented. The results of vasculature tracing algorithm shows that the suggested algorithm can obtain not only robust and accurate vessel tracing but also vascular landmarks according to thresholds.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.119-128
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• 2014

The appearance of retinal blood vessels is an important diagnostic indicator of serious disease, such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. Automatic segmentation of the retinal vasculature is a primary step towards automatic assessment of the retinal blood vessel features. This paper presents an automated method for the enhancement and segmentation of blood vessels in fundus images. To decrease the influence of the optic disk, and emphasize the vessels for each retinal image, a multidirectional morphological top-hat transform with rotating structuring elements is first applied to the background homogenized retinal image. Then, an improved multiscale line detector is presented to produce a vessel response image, and yield the retinal blood vessel tree for each retinal image. Since different line detectors at varying scales have different line responses in the multiscale detector, the line detectors with longer length produce more vessel responses than the ones with shorter length; the improved multiscale detector combines all the responses at different scales by setting different weights for each scale. The methodology is evaluated on two publicly available databases, DRIVE and STARE. Experimental results demonstrate an excellent performance that approximates the average accuracy of a human observer. Moreover, the method is simple, fast, and robust to noise, so it is suitable for being integrated into a computer-assisted diagnostic system for ophthalmic disorders.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2019.01a
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• pp.397-398
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• 2019

망막혈관 영상에서(retinal image) 혈관의 모양 또는 생성변화를 효과적으로 검진하기 위해서 망막혈관을 자동적으로 분리하는 영상분할 기법의 개발은 매우 중요한 사안이다. 이를 위해서 주로 망막혈관영상의 잡음을 억제하고 또한 혈관의 명암대비도(contrast)를 증가시키는 전처리 과정을 거쳐서 혈관의 국부적인 화소값의 변화, 방향성을 판별하여 혈관을 자동적으로 검출하는 방법들이 제시되어왔으며 최근에는 합성곱 신경망(CNN) 딥러닝 학습모델을 활용한 망막혈관 분리 알고리즘들이 제시되고 있다.