Automatic Retinal Image Registration Using Blood Vessel Segmentation and SIFT Feature

Automatic retinal image registration is still a great challenge in computer aided diagnosis and screening system. In this paper, a new retinal image registration method is proposed based on the combination of blood vessel segmentation and scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) feature. The algorithm includes two stages: retinal image segmentation and registration. In the segmentation stage, the blood vessel is segmented by using the guided filter to enhance the vessel structure and the bottom-hat transformation to extract blood vessel. In the registration stage, the SIFT algorithm is adopted to detect the feature of vessel segmentation image, complemented by using a random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm to eliminate incorrect matches. We evaluate our method from both segmentation and registration aspects. For segmentation evaluation, we test our method on DRIVE database, which provides manually labeled images from two specialists. The experimental results show that our method achieves 0.9562 in accuracy (Acc), which presents competitive performance compare to other existing segmentation methods. For registration evaluation, we test our method on STARE database, and the experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method, which makes the algorithm a suitable tool for automated retinal image analysis.