Fig. 1.

Proposed VIO vessel segmentation: In the first stage, VIO images are pre-processed with directional local-contrast filters (DLCF) and LoG-Gabor filters to eliminate artifacts and increase contrast. In the second stage, the best, unvisited vessel pixel in the image is repeatedly chosen as a starting point for a dynamic-programming exploration of the unvisited part of the image. The result of each exploration yields a new tree in the growing forest of vessels. Forest growth stops when the best, unvisited vessel pixel is worse than a predefined threshold.