Abstract
Obtaining pixel-accurate and topologically complete retinal vessel segmentation is challenging due to many factors, for instance, vascular structure complexity, image contrast variations, and limitations of valuable datasets. In this paper, we introduce a novel network structure that applies dual-branch: directional reweighted branch and skeletonized branch. In the direction reweighted branch, we propose adaptive directional enhancement and connectivity consistency enhancement, which can be used to extract favorable directional channel information and model the bidirectional relationship between pixels, respectively. In the skeletonized branch, we employ morphological skeletonization to align the ground truth with the predicted segmentation map. By doing that, we effectively preserve the vessel’s topological structure from a global perspective. Extensive experiments on publicly available retinal datasets DRIVE, CHASE_DB1, and STARE show that our proposed approach has achieved significant results in preserving vessel structure and accurate segmentation.