Retinal Vessel Segmentation: A Comparative Study of Fuzzy C-Means and Sum Entropy Information on Phase Congruency

Abstract

As the use of robotic-assisted surgery systems continue to increase, highly accurate and timely efficient automatic vasculature detection techniques for large and thin vessels in the retinal images are needed. Vascular segmentation has however been challenging due to uneven illumination in retinal images. The use of efficient pre-processing techniques as well as good segmentation techniques are highly needed to produce good vessel segmentation results. This paper presents an investigatory study on the combination of phase congruence with fuzzy c-means and the combination of phase congruence with gray level co-occurrence (GLCM) matrix sum entropy for the segmentation of retinal vessels. Fuzzy C-Means combined with phase congruence yields a higher accuracy rate but a longer running time while compared to GLCM sum entropy combined with phase congruence. While compared with the widely previously used techniques on DRIVE and STARE databases, the techniques investigated yield high average accuracy rates.