An automatic hybrid method for retinal blood vessel extraction
The extraction of blood vessels from retinal images is an important and challenging task in medical analysis and diagnosis. This paper presents a novel hybrid automatic approach for the extraction of retinal image vessels. The method consists in the application of mathematical morphology and a fuzzy clustering algorithm followed by a purification procedure. In mathematical morphology, the retinal image is smoothed and strengthened so that the blood vessels are enhanced and the background information...