Artery/vein classification using reflection features in retina fundus images

Automatic artery/vein (A/V) classification is one of the important topics in retinal image analysis. It allows the researchers to investigate the association between biomarkers and disease progression on a huge amount of data for arteries and veins separately. Recent proposed methods, which employ contextual information of vessels to achieve better A/V classification accuracy, still rely on the performance of pixel-wise classification, which has received limited attention in recent years. In this paper, we show that these classification methods can be markedly improved. We propose a new normalization technique for extracting four new features which are associated with the lightness reflection of vessels. The accuracy of a linear discriminate analysis classifier is used to validate these features. Accuracy rates of 85.1, 86.9 and 90.6% were obtained on three datasets using only local information. Based on the introduced features, the advanced graph-based methods will achieve a better performance on A/V classification.