An enhanced segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images using contourlet.

Retinal images acquired using a fundus camera often contain low grey, low level contrast and are of low dynamic range. This may seriously affect the automatic segmentation stage and subsequent results; hence, it is necessary to carry-out preprocessing to improve image contrast results before segmentation. Here we present a new multi-scale method for retinal image contrast enhancement using Contourlet transform. In this paper, a combination of feature extraction approach which utilizes Local Binary Pattern (LBP), morphological method and spatial image processing is proposed for segmenting the retinal blood vessels in optic fundus images. Furthermore, performance of Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) is investigated in the classification section. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on the publicly available DRIVE database. The results are numerically assessed for different proposed algorithms.