Impact of Image Enhancement Technique on CNN Model for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation

In this paper, we have developed a new method of accurate detection of retinal blood vessels based on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model. This method plays an important role in the observation of many eye diseases. Retinal Images have many issues that make the process of vessels segmentation very hard. We treat each issue of the retina image with the greatest observation to obtain a well-segmented image. The first step is to apply a pre-processing method based on fuzzy logic and image processing tactics. In a second step, in order to generate the segmented images, we propose a strided encoder-decoder CNN model. This network is trained and optimized using the Dice Loss function that supports the class imbalance problem that is in the database. The proposed model has a U-Net shape, but it is deeper and the pooling layers are replaced with strided convolutional layers in the encoder. This modification allows for a more precise segmentation of vessels and accelerates the training process. The last step is post-processing for removing the noisy pixels as well as the shadow of the optic disc. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated on DRIVE and STARE databases. The proposed method gives a sensitivity of 0.802 and 0.801 respectively on DRIVE and STARE, with an accuracy of 0.959 and 0.961 respectively. We focused on sensitivity and accuracy measurements that represent the accuracy of the model, especially tiny vessels. According to the results, the model outperforms many other proposed methods, especially in the above-mentioned measures.