Improved Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm and Its Application to Fundus Retinal Blood Vessel Image Binarization

The content of this work is based on the characteristics of standard artificial bee colony(ABC) algorithm with weak local search ability and slow convergence speed. Then, an improved algorithm named KD-ABC is proposed. For improving the diversity and quality of the solution, it changes the generation method of honey source. In the initialization phase, it uses the cluster center generated by the K-MEANS method as the initial honey source instead of the initialization in the standard method. For improving the local optimization ability and the convergence speed without reducing the global search, we proposed a dynamic neighborhood search mechanism based on the number of iterations in terms of ABC search strategy and neighborhood selection stage. In order to find a suitable threshold to divide the grayscale image into blood vessels and background parts, we applied the characteristics of the KD-ABC algorithm to the binary processing stage of the fundus retinal blood vessel image, which lays the foundation for future image recognition.