Contourlet transform-based sharpening enhancement of retinal images and vessel extraction application
-
Anand Swaminathan
,
Shantha Selva Kumari Ramapackiam
Abstract
Low-contrast retinal images have to be enhanced for good visual perception to aid in retinal vessel analysis. Classical sharpening enhancement techniques such as unsharp masking (USM) improve the contrast and bring out the information along with noise. This article uses a shift-invariant anisotropic Contourlet transform (CT) to decompose the retinal image into subbands. A new nonlinear method is applied over the subbands to modify the CT coefficients, followed by inverse CT. The proposed method is compared with a nonlinear USM (NLUSM) technique and wavelet transform-based method. The objective performance is measured in terms of enhancement measure. We observed that the proposed methodology provides better result. We demonstrate that this sharpening algorithm can be used as a preprocessing step to (i) adaptive histogram equalization and (ii) retinal vessel extraction. Pratt’s figure of merit was used to analyze the vessel extracted from the retinal images with their ground truth that were obtained from STARE and DRIVE databases.
References
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©2013 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Masthead
- Research articles
- Design and implementation of a control system reflecting the level of analgesia during general anesthesia
- NInFEA: an embedded framework for the real-time evaluation of fetal ECG extraction algorithms
- Basic values for heart and respiratory rates during different sleep stages in healthy infants
- Short communication
- Novel electrode configuration for highly linear impedance pneumography
- Research articles
- Jamming of fingers: an experimental study to determine force and deflection in participants and human cadaver specimens for development of a new bionic test device for validation of power-operated motor vehicle side door windows
- Biotechnical measurement and software system for the prediction and diagnosis of osteochondrosis of the lumbar region with the use of fuzzy logic rules
- Patient safety related to the use of medical devices: a review and investigation of the current status in the medical device industry
- Novel method of lung area extraction in chest perfusion computed tomography
- Contourlet transform-based sharpening enhancement of retinal images and vessel extraction application
- In vitro construction of tissue-engineered bone with bone morphogenetic protein-2-transfected rabbit bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells and hydroxyapatite nanocomposite
