State-of-the art approaches to retinal vessel segmentation typically require extensive annotations, a highly time-consuming process, reliant on clinical expertise. We present FPG-Seg, an annotation-free pipeline for retinal vessel segmentation combining classical vesselness filtering, Bayesian deep learning and topology-aware graph reconstruction to segment retinal vessel topology without manual labels. Tested across four widely used benchmark datasets for retinal vessel segmentation, FPG-Seg attains a clDice of 0.74−0.78, representing 86−98% of the performance of an equivalent fully-supervised baseline, despite using no manual annotations for training or hyperparameter tuning. As part of this work, we also provide, to our knowledge, the first performance benchmark of an annotation-free vessel segmentation method on FIVES.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Illustration of pipeline stages; showing input image (1), ground truth (GT) (2), Frangi response (3), Bayesian probability map (4), graph mask (5) and final output (6).
Figure 2: FPG segmentation pipeline: input image, Frangi filter, probability map, extracted graph/skeleton, segmentation.
Figure 3: Comparison of baseline and FPG-Seg outputs.