Multiscale Joint Optimization Strategy for Retinal Vascular Segmentation

The accurate segmentation of retinal vascular is of great significance for the diagnosis of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, microaneurysms and arteriosclerosis. In order to segment more deep and small blood vessels and provide more information to doctors, a multi‐scale joint optimization strategy for retinal vascular segmentation is presented in this paper. Firstly, the Multi‐ Scale Retinex (MSR) algorithm is used to improve the uneven illumination of fundus images. Then, the multi‐scale Gaussian matched filtering method is used to enhance the contrast of the retinal images. Optimized by the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, Otsu algorithm (OTSU) multi‐threshold segmentation is utilized to segment the retinal image extracted by the multi‐scale matched filtering method. Finally, the image is post‐processed, including binarization, morpholog-ical operation and edge‐contour removal. The test experiments are implemented on the DRIVE and STARE datasets to evaluate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method. Compared with other existing methods, it can be concluded that the proposed method can segment more small blood vessels while ensuring the integrity of vascular structure and has a higher performance. The proposed method has more obvious targets, a higher contrast, more plentiful detailed information, and local features. The qualitative and quantitative analysis results show that the presented method is superior to the other advanced methods.