• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.1073-1081
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• 2009

In this paper, we proposed new method to enhance choroidal vessels by suppressing retina vessels brightness. It is well-known that CNV(choroidal neovascularization) is related with sight loss. The main feature of CNV is the occurrence of new vessels in choroid. Unfortunately, because retina vessels brightness is stronger than choroidal vessels brightness in ICGA(indocynanine green angiography) image, so that the choroidal vessels were hardly recognized. Therefore, for correct diagnosis, the choroidal vessels must be enhanced in ICGA image. The proposed enhancement method consists of 3 strategies. First, the retina vessels were detected by multi scale enhancement technique, hysteresis thresholding, KNN(Kth-nearest neighbor) classification method. And then, a retina vessel mask was generated from detection result. Next, the brightness of retina vessels was suppressed by the proposed conditional region erosion method and mask region until the mask region was vanished. Finally, the brightness of choroidal vessel was enhanced on processed image. Through an experiment, we had confirmed that the proposed method was robust and efficient.