How to fill the blank regions within blood vessels?

Hello,

I am doing the blood vessel extraction of retinal eye fundus images and got an output as in figure above.But I can see some

gaps within the blood vessels which need to be filled(i.e, the black lines inside the white blood vessels).

Can anyone suggest me how to do this task.

Answer 1

[KALYAN ACHARJYA]

If I am not mistaken, I have answered this question some time back.

Steps:

1. Invert (So that the target black pixels become tiny white regions)
2. Morphological Operation (Erode the image with proper struturing element), so that all tiny white region within the vessels should be erode.
3. Dilate by same structuring element to mainain the same in the others parts of the image
4. Invert Back

Cheers :)

[Krishna Chaitanya]

sorry i'm new to matlab which structuring element should i use for this task

[KALYAN ACHARJYA]

Try with multiple types, see which are best fit in your case. May be

SE = strel('disk',r,n)