An Implementation of Multiscale Line Detection and Mathematical Morphology for Efficient and Precise Blood Vessel Segmentation in Fundus Images

Diagnosing various diseases such as glaucoma,age-related macular degeneration,cardiovascular conditions,and diabetic retinopathy involves segmenting retinal blood vessels.The task is particularly challenging when dealing with color fundus images due to issues like non-uniformillumination,low contrast,and variations in vessel appearance,especially in the presence of different pathologies.Furthermore,the speed of the retinal vessel segmentation system is of utmost importance.With the surge of now available big data,the speed of the algorithm becomes increasingly important,carrying almost equivalent weightage to the accuracy of the algorithm.To address these challenges,we present a novel approach for retinal vessel segmentation,leveraging efficient and robust techniques based on multiscale line detection and mathematical morphology.Our algorithm’s performance is evaluated on two publicly available datasets,namely the Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction dataset(DRIVE)and the Structure Analysis of Retina(STARE)dataset.The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method,withmean accuracy values of 0.9467 forDRIVE and 0.9535 for STARE datasets,aswell as sensitivity values of 0.6952 forDRIVE and 0.6809 for STARE datasets.Notably,our algorithmexhibits competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods.Importantly,it operates at an average speed of 3.73 s per image for DRIVE and 3.75 s for STARE datasets.It is worth noting that these results were achieved using Matlab scripts containing multiple loops.This suggests that the processing time can be further reduced by replacing loops with vectorization.Thus the proposed algorithm can be deployed in real time applications.In summary,our proposed system strikes a fine balance between swift computation and accuracy that is on par with the best available methods in the field.

Point association analysis of vessel target detection with SAR, HFSWR and AIS

A space-borne synthetic aperture radar （SAR）, a high frequency surface wave radar （HFSWR）, and a ship automatic identification system （AIS） are the main remote sensors for vessel monitoring in a wide range. These three sensors have their own advantages and weaknesses, and they can complement each other in some situations. So it would improve the capability of vessel target detection to use multiple sensors including SAR, HFSWR, and A/S to identify non-cooperative vessel targets from the fusion results. During the fusion process of multiple sensors＇ detection results, point association is one of the key steps, and it can affect the accuracy of the data fusion and the efficiency of a non-cooperative target＇s recognition. This study investigated the point association analyses of vessel target detection under different conditions： space- borne SAR paired with AIS, as well as HFSWR, paired with AIS, and the characteristics of the SAR and the HFSWR and their capability of vessel target detection. Then a point association method of multiple sensors was proposed. Finally, the thresholds selection of key parameters in the points association （including range threshold, radial velocity threshold, and azimuth threshold） were investigated, and their influences on final association results were analyzed.