U-Net与自适应阈值脉冲耦合神经网络相结合的眼底血管分割方法

由于眼底血管结构复杂多变,且图像中血管与背景对比度低,眼底血管分割存在巨大困难,尤其是微小型血管难以分割.基于深层全卷积神经网络的U-Net能够有效提取血管图像全局及局部信息,但由于其输出为灰度图像,并采用硬阈值实现二值化,这会导致血管区域丢失、血管过细等问题.针对这些问题,提出一种结合U-Net与脉冲耦合神经网络(P...

Fundus vessel segmentation method based on U-Net and pulse coupled neural network with adaptive threshold

Due to the complex and variable structure of fundus vessels， and the low contrast between the fundus vessel and the background， there are huge difficulties in segmentation of fundus vessels， especially small fundus vessels. U-Net based on deep fully convolutional neural network can effectively extract the global and local information of fundus vessel images，but its output is grayscale image binarized by a hard threshold， which will cause the loss of vessel area， too thin vessel and other problems. To solve these problems， U-Net and Pulse Coupled Neural Network （PCNN） were combined to give play to their respective advantages and design a fundus vessel segmentation method. First， the iterative U-Net model was used to highlight the vessels， the fusion results of the features extracted by the U-Net model and the original image were input again into the improved U-Net model to enhance the vessel image. Then， the U-Net output result was viewed as a gray image， and the PCNN with adaptive threshold was utilized to perform accurate vessel segmentation. The experimental results show that the AUC （Area Under the Curve） of the proposed method was 0.979 6，0.980 9 and 0.982 7 on the DRVIE， STARE and CHASE_DB1 datasets， respectively. The method can extract more vessel details， and has strong generalization ability and good application prospects.