The multiscale bowler-hat transform for blood vessel enhancement in retinal images

Highlights：

• We propose the bowler-hat transform - a new multiscale vessel enhancement approach based on mathematical morphology.

• The method combines different structuring elements to detect innate features of vessel-like structures.

• We evaluate the proposed method qualitatively and quantitatively, and compare it with the existing, state-of-the-art methods using both synthetic and real datasets.

• The proposed method achieves high-quality vessel-like structure enhancement in both synthetic examples and in clinically relevant retinal images, and is shown to be able to detect fine vessels while remaining robust at junctions.