Severe: Segmenting vessels in retina images

This paper presents the unsupervised retinal vessels segmentation method, SEVERE (SEgmenting VEssels in REtina images), which is based on the direction map of retina scan images assigning each pixel one out of twelve discrete directions. SEVERE works on the green channel of RGB retina scan images. It does not require any pre-processing phase and all the computations are done exclusively on the direction map. SEVERE has been checked on publicly available datasets producing qualitatively satisfactory results and outperforming other existing methods in terms of quantitative performance evaluation parameters, such as accuracy and sensitivity. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.