Retinal Vessel Segmentation Based on Frangi Filter

and Morphological Reconstruction

Hanung Adi Nugroho*, Rezty Amalia Aras, Tri Lestari, Igi Ardiyanto
Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology
Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Gadjah Mada
Jalan Grafika 2, Kampus UGM, Yogyakarta 55281, Indonesia
*adinugroho@ugm.ac.id

Abstract—The analysis of structural changes in retinal

vessels is the most important part for diagnosing and
detecting retinal related diseases such as diabetic
retinopathy, hypertension, age-related macular
degeneration (AMD) and arteriosclerotic. This paper Retinal vessels

presents a method for segmenting retinal vessels in retinal

fundus image based on Frangi filter and morphological
reconstruction. The proposed method is evaluated using
colour fundus images from DRIVE and STARE datasets.
In DRIVE dataset, the performance of proposed method
achieves an average of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy
at 72.13%, 96.65 % and 94.50%, respectively. Meanwhile,
in STARE dataset, it achieves an average sensitivity of
75.50%, specificity of 90.38% and accuracy of 88.76%.
These results indicate that the proposed method
successfully segments retinal vessels in fundus images.
Keywords—retinal related diseases; retinal vessels; Frangi filter;
morphological reconstruction; fundus image
I. INTRODUCTION
In ophthalmology, detection and segmentation of blood
vessels are essentially required as part of analysis of colour
retinal images for monitoring and diagnosis the severity of
retinal related diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy,
hypertension, AMD and arteriosclerotic [1, 2]. Early detection
in diagnosing retinal related diseases is important to give
appropriate treatment and to prevent vision loss [3]. Various
structures and components are present in the human retina such
as foveal avascular zone (FAZ), macula, optic disc and retinal
blood vessels as shown in Fig. 1. Early symptoms of disease
are expressed by features of retinal blood vessels such as
diameter, length, angle and tortuosity [4]. Segmentation of
retinal blood vessels can facilitate the ophthalmologists in
diagnosing eye diseases as well as clinical studies and screening
for patients.
Several methods of retinal blood vessels segmentation have
been developed in previous studies. Quinn et al. [5] proposed
retinal blood vessels segmentation using curvelet transform and
morphological reconstruction, while Sasidharan et al. [6]
presented the extraction and segmentation of coronary arteries
from X-ray angiographic images using noise adaptive fuzzy
switching median (NAFSM) filter combined with Frangi’s
vessel detection and region growing.
Macula
Optic disc Foveal avascular zone
(FAZ)
Fig. 1. The main structure of retinal image [7]
In this research work, a method for segmentation of retinal
blood vessels from retinal fundus images is proposed by
combining Frangi filter with morphological reconstruction.
The proposed method is applied in DRIVE and STARE
datasets. The paper is written in several sections. Having
introduced the problems in first section, the second section
describes the dataset and the proposed scheme. In the third
section, the results are presented and analysed. Subsequently,
the conclusion is presented in the final section.
II. DATASET AND METHOD
This study uses a total of sixty digital colour retinal images
consisting of forty images from DRIVE dataset [7] and twenty
images from STARE dataset [8]. Ground truth images are also
available in these datasets. The proposed method consists of
two main schemes. The two schemes conducted in this study
are illustrated in Fig. 2.
A. Frangi Filter for Vessels Detection
The Frangi filter can be used to detect continuous edges,
such as vessels. It uses eigenvalues of Hessian matrix to find
tubular structures. In Frangi method, 2D pixels are expressed
in 3D by adding intensity values of Z-coordinate. The equation
is formulated in (1).
𝐶 = (𝑥, 𝑦, 𝐼) (1)
with I is pixel intensity (x, y). Hessian matrix is the second
order partial derivative of a function as formulated in (2).
𝐼𝑥𝑥 (𝑥, 𝑦) 𝐼𝑥𝑦 (𝑥, 𝑦)
𝐻=( ) (2)
𝐼𝑦𝑥 (𝑥, 𝑦) 𝐼𝑦𝑦 (𝑥, 𝑦)
Two Eigen values can be calculated for each pixel from this
Hessian matrix. To extract small vessels or known as retinal
capillaries, this operation is applied on different scales. The
maximum of V is calculated across multiple scales for getting
final result as mathematically formulated in (3).
𝐹(𝑥, 𝑦) = 𝑚𝑎𝑥{𝑉(𝑥, 𝑦, 𝑒1 (𝜎))}
Operation of morphological reconstruction is a continuation
of pre-processing stage, such as extraction of green channel,
complement of green channel and CLAHE. Each of this
process is described as the following.
C. Extraction of Green Channel
Based on the histogram of red, green and blue channels as
shown in Fig. 3, the green channel shows the best contrast
between retinal vessels and the background. On the other hand,
red and blue channels have more noises. Therefore, the green
channel is selected to minimise the presence of noise as well as
to obtain more enhanced of retinal blood vessels.
(3)

with 𝜎 is the scale.

Start

RGB fundus
image
(a) (b)
Scheme-1 Scheme-2
Green channel
Frangi filtering
extraction
Complement
operation

CLAHE

(c) (d)
Median filtering
Fig. 3. The images result of channel extraction (a) original image (b) red
Morphological Morphological channel (c) green channel and (d) blue channel.
reconstruction reconstruction
Morphological Morphological D. Complement Operation
OR Operation
image image
Complement of green channel is used to raise the
Detected illumination of retinal vessels from the digital colour retinal
retinal vessels fundus image. The function of the complement is mentioned in
(6) and (7).
End
𝐴𝑐 = 𝑈\𝐴 (6)
𝑐
Fig. 2. Flowchart of the proposed method 𝐴 = {𝜔 ∈ 𝑈|𝜔 ∉ 𝐴} (7)

B. Morphological Reconstruction with 𝐴𝑐 is the symbol of complement and 𝜔 is the element of

Reconstruction is a morphological transformation involving
two images (i.e. the mask and the marker) and a structuring
element. If g is the mask and f is the marker, reconstruction of
g from f is declared as Rg(f) which is defined by the following
iterative procedure.
• Initialise ℎ1 into image marker f
• Create structuring element: B = ones (3)
• Repeat
ℎ𝑘+1 = (ℎ𝑘 ⊕ 𝐵) ∩ 𝑔
to ℎ𝑘+1 = ℎ𝑘
The image marker 𝑓 has to be part of 𝑔; so,
𝑓⊆𝑔
𝑈 or not element of 𝐴. The complement makes the appearance
of retinal blood vessels brighter than other features in the colour
retinal images.
E. Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalisation
(CLAHE)
CLAHE technique is extremely used to enhance the contrast
of medical images. This method operates on the small region
of image called ‘tile’. Enhancement calculation is modified
based on contrast-limit level according to user-specified
(4) maximum by placing limit l, 0 ≤ l ≤ 1.
F. Median Filter
Median filtering has a strong ability to eliminate noises such
as salt and pepper noise which appears as white and black dots
in the images. This filter replaces a pixel value in the centre
(5)
coordinate of sliding windows with the median value of pixels 𝑇𝑃 + 𝑇𝑁
𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦 = 𝑥100% (10)
in the window. 𝑇𝑃 + 𝐹𝑃 + 𝑇𝑁 + 𝐹𝑁
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A. Scheme-1
In [6], vessels detection based on Frangi filter was
conducted by extracting and segmenting coronary arteries from
X-ray angiographic images. Similarly, in this work, Frangi
filter is applied for segmenting retinal vessels on digital colour
fundus images. As shown in Fig. 4 (b), the image resulted by
Frangi filter still detects the retinal boundary. Therefore, it is (a) (b)
overcome by applying morphological reconstruction as
presented in Fig. 4 (c).

(c) (d)

(a) (b) (c)

Fig. 4. The images result of (a) original RGB image (b) Frangi filter and
(c) morphological reconstruction.

B. Scheme-2 (e) (f)

Channel extraction aims to extract the red, green and blue Fig. 5. The images result of (a) original RGB image (b) green channel
extraction (c) complement operation (d) CLAHE (e) median filtering (f)
channels. The extracted green channel is then selected since it
morphological reconstruction.
has enough information for segmenting retinal blood vessels.
Then, complement operation is applied followed by CLAHE
method to make retinal vessels more clearly. However, this
process yields some noises in the enhanced image. Thus,
median filter is conducted to eliminate these noises. Finally,
filtered image is processed by morphological reconstruction to
obtain the candidates of segmented retinal vessels. The resulted
images of scheme-2 are depicted from Fig. 5 (a) to Fig. 5 (f).
Scheme-1 is able to segment the retinal vessels more clearly;
however, the small vessels tend to be lost. While the scheme-2
successfully segments the small vessels. Therefore, to obtain
better results, retinal vessels segmented from scheme-1 (Fig. 4
(c)) are combined with that of scheme-2 (Fig. 5 (f)) by
employing OR operation. An example of final result of retinal
vessels segmentation is shown in Fig. 6.
To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, two Fig. 6. The final result of segmented retinal vessels
datasets consisting of DRIVE and STARE are used. The retinal
vessels segmented by the proposed method are then compared True positive (TP) is the number of vessels pixels correctly
to the ground truth image. Some parameters such as true segmented as vessels while true negative (TN) is the number of
positive (TP), true negative (TN), false positive (FP) and false non-vessels correctly segmented as non-vessels. False positive
negative (FN) are considered to calculate the rate of sensitivity, (FP) is the number of non-vessels pixels segmented as vessels
specificity and accuracy by using (8) until (10). while false negative (FN) is the number of vessels pixels
segmented as non-vessels. The evaluation results are presented
𝑇𝑃 in Table 1.
𝑆𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑦 = 𝑥100% (8)
Based on Table 1, implementation of the proposed method
𝑇𝑃 + 𝐹𝑁
𝑇𝑁 on DRIVE dataset obtains the average of sensitivity, specificity
𝑆𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑦 = 𝑥100% (9) and accuracy at 72.13%, 96.65% and 94.50%, respectively.
𝑇𝑁 + 𝐹𝑃 While the implementation of the proposed method on STARE
dataset achieves the average sensitivity of 75.50%, specificity
of 90.38% and accuracy of 88.76%.
TABLE I. THE EVALUATION RESULTS OF THE PROPOSED METHOD
Dataset Sensitivity (%) Specificity (%) Accuracy (%)
DRIVE 72.13 96.65 94.50
STARE 75.50 90.38 88.76
IV. CONCLUSION
A method for segmenting retinal vessels based on Frangi
filter and morphological reconstruction has been proposed. The
proposed method is validated on DRIVE and STARE datasets.
The evaluation results on the DRIVE dataset achieve the
average sensitivity of 72.13 %, specificity of 96.65 % and
accuracy of 94.50%. Whilst that of STARE dataset achieves
the average of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy at 75.50%,
90.38 % and 88.76%, respectively. These successful results in
segmenting retinal vessels indicate that the proposed scheme
has a potential to be implemented in the development of
computerised retinal related diseases detection system.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to acknowledge the Directorate
General of Higher Education, Ministry of Research, Technology
and Higher Education, Republic of Indonesia for financially
supported by the Research Grant “Penelitian Unggulan
Perguruan Tinggi” Universitas Gadjah Mada, No.
2365/UN1.P.III/DIT-LIT/LT/2017. The authors would like to
thank the Intelligence Systems research group members for
inspiring discussion and sharing meaningful knowledge.
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