The extraction of blood vessels from retinal images is an important and challenging task in medical analysis and diagnosis. This paper presents a novel hybrid automatic approach for the extraction of retinal image vessels. The method consists in the application of mathematical morphology and a fuzzy clustering algorithm followed by a purification procedure. In mathematical morphology, the retinal image is smoothed and strengthened so that the blood vessels are enhanced and the background information is suppressed. The fuzzy clustering algorithm is then employed to the previous enhanced image for segmentation. After the fuzzy segmentation, a purification procedure is used to reduce the weak edges and noise, and the final results of the blood vessels are consequently achieved. The performance of the proposed method is compared with some existing segmentation methods and hand-labeled segmentations. The approach has been tested on a series of retinal images, and experimental results show that our technique is promising and effective.
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Fuzzy clustering can be helpful in finding natural vague boundaries in data. The fuzzy c-means method is one of the most popular clustering methods based on minimization of a criterion function. However, one of the greatest disadvantages of this method is its sensitivity to the presence of noise and outliers in the data. The present paper introduces a new ε-insensitive Fuzzy C-Means (εFCM) clustering algorithm. As a special case, this algorithm includes the well-known Fuzzy C-Medians method (FCMED). The performance of the new clustering algorithm is experimentally compared with the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) method using synthetic data with outliers and heavy-tailed, overlapped groups of the data.
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