Retinal Vessel Segmentation, a Review of Classic and Deep Methods

Retinal illnesses such as diabetic retinopathy (DR) are the main causes of vision loss. In the early recognition of eye diseases, the segmentation of blood vessels in retina images plays an important role. Different symptoms of ocular diseases can be identified by the geometric features of ocular arteries. However, due to the complex construction of the blood vessels and their different thicknesses, segmenting the retina image is a challenging task. There are a number of algorithms that helped the detection of retinal diseases. This paper presents an overview of papers from 2016 to 2022 that discuss machine learning and deep learning methods for automatic vessel segmentation. The methods are divided into two groups: Deep learning-based, and classic methods. Algorithms, classifiers, pre-processing and specific techniques of each group is described, comprehensively. The performances of recent works are compared based on their achieved accuracy in different datasets in inclusive tables. A survey of most popular datasets like DRIVE, STARE, HRF and CHASE_DB1 is also given in this paper. Finally, a list of findings from this review is presented in the conclusion section.