Title: Evaluation and comparison of retinal blood vessels extraction using edge detectors in diabetic retinopathy

Authors: Sunita Sarangi; Sukant Kumar Sabut; Diptimayee Majhi

Addresses: Department of Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering, Institute of Technical Education & Research, Siksha 'O' Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar 751030, Odisha, India ' Department of Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering, Institute of Technical Education & Research, Siksha 'O' Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar 751030, Odisha, India ' Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, Krupajala College of Engineering, Bhubaneswar 751 002, Odisha, India

Abstract: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a vascular disorder that affects the microvasculature of the retina. Early detection of DR helps the ophthalmologists in diagnosis and treatment to save the vision of the patient. The change in appearance of retinal blood vessel structures can be detected by edge detectors. In this paper different edge detectors have been evaluated to find the abnormalities in diabetic retinal blood vessels and the results are compared with a healthy retinal image. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error values are computed for quantitative evaluation and the modulation-transfer function has been performed to represent the results graphically for edge detectors. The evaluated result shows that the Canny operator gives better output with high PSNR values in detecting tiny blood vessels of retina compared to other edge detectors like Robert, Prewitt and Sobel operator. The average value of the sensitivity and specificity are 15.6% and 85.4%.

Keywords: diabetic retinopathy; retinal images; digital image processing; edge detectors; retinal blood vessels; modulation transfer function; sensitivity; specificity; blood vessel extraction; diabetes; vascular disorders; peak SNR; signal-to-noise ratio; PSNR; mean square error; MSE; blindness; vision impairment.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSISE.2016.076229

International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering, 2016 Vol.9 No.3, pp.174 - 183

Received: 19 Apr 2013
Accepted: 02 May 2014
Published online: 30 Apr 2016 *

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