Patent ID: 8428323

Claim:
A method of processing a blood vessel image, comprising: i) a Gabor filtering step to sharpen an original blood vessel image using a Gabor filter in consideration of various directions and thicknesses of blood vessels included in the blood vessel image; ii) an edge detection step to detect edges according to a change in brightness in a blood vessel domain and a non-blood vessel domain of the original blood vessel image and the blood vessel image on which the Gabor filtering step of Step i) is completed, using an edge extraction method based on a first-order differentiation or second-order differentiation; iii) a blood vessel image sharpening step to fuse the original blood vessel image with the blood vessel image on which the edge detection step of Step ii) is completed, fusing the blood vessel image on which the Gabor filtering step of Step i) is completed with an edge blood vessel image detected in the image to which the Gabor filter of Step ii) is applied, determining weight values which can be applied to the pixels of the two fused images using a neural network, and fusing the two images to sharpen the blood vessel image, wherein the blood vessel image sharpening step is performed using the neural network; and iv) a blood vessel image sharpening step to sharpen the blood vessel image on which the Gabor filtering step of Step i) is completed and the blood vessel image sharpened through the neural network of Step iii) using a score level fusion method, wherein the blood vessel image sharpening step is performed through a score level fusion.