Image decomposition based segmentation of retinal vessels

Retinal vessel segmentation has various applications in the biomedical field. This includes early disease detection, biometric authentication using retinal scans, classification and others. Many of these applications rely critically on an accurate and efficient segmentation technique. In the existing literature, a lot of work has been done to improve the accuracy of the segmentation task, but it relies heavily on the amount of data available for training as well as the quality of the images captured. Another gap is observed in terms of the resources used in these heavily trained algorithms. This paper aims to address these gaps by using a resource-efficient unsupervised technique and also increasing the accuracy of retinal vessel segmentation using the Fourier decomposition method (FDM) along with the Gabor transform for image signals. The proposed method has an accuracy of 97.39%, 97.62%, 95.34%, and 96.57% on DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1, and HRF datasets, respectively. The sensitivities were found to be 88.36%, 88.51%, 90.37%, and 79.07%, respectively. A separate section makes a detailed comparison of the proposed method with several well-known methods and an analysis of the efficiency of the proposed method. The proposed method proves to be efficient in terms of time and resource requirements. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.