scholarly journals Retina Image Vessel Segmentation Using a Hybrid CGLI Level Set Method

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guannan Chen ◽  
Meizhu Chen ◽  
Jichun Li ◽  
Encai Zhang

As a nonintrusive method, the retina imaging provides us with a better way for the diagnosis of ophthalmologic diseases. Extracting the vessel profile automatically from the retina image is an important step in analyzing retina images. A novel hybrid active contour model is proposed to segment the fundus image automatically in this paper. It combines the signed pressure force function introduced by the Selective Binary and Gaussian Filtering Regularized Level Set (SBGFRLS) model with the local intensity property introduced by the Local Binary fitting (LBF) model to overcome the difficulty of the low contrast in segmentation process. It is more robust to the initial condition than the traditional methods and is easily implemented compared to the supervised vessel extraction methods. Proposed segmentation method was evaluated on two public datasets, DRIVE (Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction) and STARE (Structured Analysis of the Retina) (the average accuracy of 0.9390 with 0.7358 sensitivity and 0.9680 specificity on DRIVE datasets and average accuracy of 0.9409 with 0.7449 sensitivity and 0.9690 specificity on STARE datasets). The experimental results show that our method is effective and our method is also robust to some kinds of pathology images compared with the traditional level set methods.

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liang Gao ◽  
Xiaoyun Liu ◽  
Wufan Chen

Automatically extracting breast tumor boundaries in ultrasound images is a difficult task due to the speckle noise, the low image contrast, the variance in shapes, and the local changes of image intensity. In this paper, an improved edge-based active contour model in a variational level set formulation is proposed for semi-automatically capturing ultrasonic breast tumor boundaries. First, we apply the phase asymmetry approach to enhance the edges, and then we define a new edge stopping function, which can increase the robustness to the intensity inhomogeneities. To extend the capture range of the method and provide good convergence to boundary concavities, we use the phase information to obtain an improved edge map, which can be used to calculate the gradient vector flow (GVF). Combining the edge stopping term and the improved GVF in the level set framework, the proposed method can robustly cope with noise, and it can extract the low contrast and/or concave boundaries well. Experiments on breast ultrasound images show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-art methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 1309-1317
Author(s):  
Jie Zhao ◽  
Qianjin Feng

Retinal vessel segmentation plays a significant role in the diagnosis and treatment of ophthalmological diseases. Recent studies have proved that deep learning can effectively segment the retinal vessel structure. However, the existing methods have difficulty in segmenting thin vessels, especially when the original image contains lesions. Based on generative adversarial network (GAN), this paper proposes a deep network with residual module and attention module (Deep Att-ResGAN). The network consists of four identical subnetworks. The output of each subnetwork is imported to the next subnetwork as contextual features that guide the segmentation. Firstly, the problems of the original image, namely, low contrast, uneven illumination, and data insufficiency, were solved through image enhancement and preprocessing. Next, an improved U-Net was adopted to serve as the generator, which stacks the residual and attention modules. These modules optimize the weight of the generator, and enhance the generalizability of the network. Further, the segmentation was refined iteratively by the discriminator, which contributes to the performance of vessel segmentation. Finally, comparative experiments were carried out on two public datasets: Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction (DRIVE) and Structured Analysis of the Retina (STARE). The experimental results show that Deep Att-ResGAN outperformed the equivalent models like U-Net and GAN in most metrics. Our network achieved accuracy of 0.9565 and F1 of 0.829 on DRIVE, and accuracy of 0.9690 and F1 of 0.841 on STARE.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 165-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdallah Azizi ◽  
Kaouther Elkourd ◽  
Zineb Azizi

AbstractEdge based active contour models are adequate to some extent in segmenting images with intensity inhomogeneity but often fail when applied to images with poorly defined or noisy boundaries. Instead of the classical and widely used gradient or edge stopping function which fails to stop contour evolution at such boundaries, we use local binary pattern stopping function to construct a robust and effective active contour model for image segmentation. In fact, comparing to edge stopping function, local binary pattern stopping function accurately distinguishes object’s boundaries and determines the local intensity variation dint to the local binary pattern textons used to classify the image regions. Moreover, the local binary pattern stopping function is applied using a variational level set formulation that forces the level set function to be close to a signed distance function to eliminate costly re-initialization and speed up the motion of the curve. Experiments on several gray level images confirm the advantages and the effectiveness the proposed model.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yingjie Zhang ◽  
Jianxing Xu ◽  
H. D. Cheng

The level set methods have provided powerful frameworks for image segmentation. However, to obtain accurate boundaries of the objects, especially when they have weak edges or inhomogeneous intensities, is still a very challenging task. Actually, we have studied the popular existing level set approaches and discovered that they failed to segment the images with weak edges or inhomogeneous intensities in many cases. The weak/blurry edges and inhomogeneous intensities cause uncertainty and fuzziness for segmentation. In this paper, a novel fuzzy level set approach is proposed. At first,S-function based on the maximum fuzzy entropy principle (MEP) is used to map the image from space domain to fuzzy domain. Then, an energy function is formulated according to the differences between the actual and estimated probability densities of the intensities in different regions. A partial differential equation is derived for finding the minimum of the energy function. The proposed approach has been tested on both synthetic images and real images and evaluated by several popular metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can locate the true object boundaries, even for objects with blurry boundaries, low contrast, and inhomogeneous intensities.


2014 ◽  
Vol 687-691 ◽  
pp. 4128-4131
Author(s):  
Hong Wei Han

Image segmentation is one of the most fundamental and important areas in the field of image processing and computer vision. The traditional level set methods need initialize the level set function as a distance function. If the initial contour is selected inappropriate, we may not get the desired ideal segmentation result. In order to solve the problem of level set automation initial, we proposed a new image segmentation algorithm based on level set and marker extraction. First, we extract the internal mark as level set initial curve by using Extended-minima transform. And then, through using the local binary fitting active contour model, we evolve the labeled image to get the final segmentation result. The simulation results show that this method has low computing complexity than the traditional level set method requirements, and can effectively solve the initialization problem of level set.


Author(s):  
JIANJUN YUAN ◽  
JIANJUN WANG ◽  
LIPEI LIU

This paper presents a new local region-based and local gradient-based active contour model in a variational level set formulation for image segmentation. The model consists of three parts: the local region term, the local gradient term and the regularization term. The local region term is insensitive to noise, while the local gradient term has better capability of localization than the local region. The energy minimization is achieved by the level set evolution in an iterative strategy. In each iteration, the local intensity and local gradient are updated and fed into the level set evolution. Comparative experiments show that our model achieves the better performance on the ultrasound images with noise and low signal-to-noise ratio than the local binary fitting (LBF) energy model.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed M. Abdelsamea ◽  
Giorgio Gnecco ◽  
Mohamed Medhat Gaber ◽  
Eyad Elyan

Most Active Contour Models (ACMs) deal with the image segmentation problem as a functional optimization problem, as they work on dividing an image into several regions by optimizing a suitable functional. Among ACMs, variational level set methods have been used to build an active contour with the aim of modeling arbitrarily complex shapes. Moreover, they can handle also topological changes of the contours. Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) have attracted the attention of many computer vision scientists, particularly in modeling an active contour based on the idea of utilizing the prototypes (weights) of a SOM to control the evolution of the contour. SOM-based models have been proposed in general with the aim of exploiting the specific ability of SOMs to learn the edge-map information via their topology preservation property and overcoming some drawbacks of other ACMs, such as trapping into local minima of the image energy functional to be minimized in such models. In this survey, we illustrate the main concepts of variational level set-based ACMs, SOM-based ACMs, and their relationship and review in a comprehensive fashion the development of their state-of-the-art models from a machine learning perspective, with a focus on their strengths and weaknesses.


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