Using Anisotropic Diffusion in the Multiscale Ridge Detection Method

Abstract

A ridge detection algorithm is proposed for tracing blood vessels on images of the ocular fundus. Multiscale non-maximum suppression is applied to the image Laplacian. The multiscale algorithm exploits the pyramidal fine structure similarly to the SIFT method. Anisotropic diffusion is used in preprocessing, which makes it possible to boost the value of the convolution of the Laplacian with the Gaussian on ridge structures. The proposed algorithm has been tested on the ophthalmological image database DRIVE. The proposed preprocessing has substantially improved the ridge detection quality.