Extended U-net for retinal vessel segmentation

International audienceThe retinal vascular tree is an important biomarker for the diagnosis of ocular disease , where an efficient segmentation is highly required. Recently, various standard Convolutional Neural Networks CNN dedicated for segmentation are applied for retinal vessel segmentation. In fact, retinal blood vessels are presented in different retinal image resolutions with a complicated morphology. Thus, it is difficult for the standard configuration of CNN to guarantee an optimal feature extraction and efficient segmentation whatever the image resolution is. In this paper, new retinal vessel segmentation approach based on deep learning architecture is propounded. The idea consists of enlarging the kernel size of convolution layer in order to cover the vessel pixels as well as more neighbors for extracting features. Within this objective, our main contribution consists of identifying the kernel size in correlation with retinal image resolution through an experimental approach. Then, a novel U-net extension is proposed by using convolution layer with the identified kernel size. The suggested method is evaluated on two public databases DRIVE and HRF having different resolutions, where higher segmentation performances are achieved respectively with 5*5 and 7*7 convolution kernel sizes. The average accuracy and sensitivity values for DRIVE and HRF databases are respectively in the order of to 0.9785, 0.8474 and 0.964 and 0.803 which outperform the segmentation performance for the standard U-net