Blood vessel segmentation in retinal images using deep learning approaches

This diploma thesis deals with the application of deep neural networks with focus on image segmentation. The theoretical part contains a description of deep neural networks and a summary of widely used convolutional architectures for segmentation of objects from the image. Practical part of the work was devoted to testing of an existing network architectures. For this purpose, an open-source software library Tensorflow, implemented in Python programming language, was used. A frequent problem incorporating the use of convolutional neural networks is the requirement on large amount of input data. In order to overcome this obstacle a new data set, consisting of a combination of five freely available databases was created. The selected U-net network architecture was tested by first modification of the newly created data set. Based on the test results, the chosen network architecture has been modified. By these means a new network has been created achieving better performance in comparison to the original network. The modified architecture is then trained on a newly created data set, that contains images of different types taken with various fundus cameras. As a result, the trained network is more robust and allows segmentation of retina blood vessels from images with different parameters. The modified architecture was tested on the STARE, CHASE, and HRF databases. Results were compared with published segmentation methods from literature, which are based on convolutional neural networks, as well as classical segmentation methods. The created network shows a high success rate of retina blood vessels segmentation comparable to state-of-the-art methods