Matched Filter and Kirsch’s Template Based Approach for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

The analysis of retinal images plays an instrumental role in diagnosing Diabetic Retinopathy. This progressive disease can cause blindness which can be inhibited with earlier detection. A robust approach is presented in this paper for blood vessel segmentation by integrating a matched filter with Kirsch’s template with hysteresis thresholding. The proposed approach involved three steps: preprocessing, blood vessel extraction, and post-processing for vessel extraction. This approach achieved more accurate results than the original Kirsch’s template for specificity, sensitivity, and accuracy on the DRIVE dataset.