Dissimilarity criteria and their comparison for quantitative evaluation of image segmentation: application to human retina vessels

International audienceThe quantitative evaluation of image segmentation is an important and difficult task that is required for making a decision on the choice of a segmentation method and for the optimal tuning of its parameter values. To perform this quantitative evaluation, dissimilarity criteria are relevant with respect to the human visual perception, contrary to metrics that have been shown to be visually not adapted. This article proposes to compare eleven dissimilarity criteria together. The field of retina vessels image segmentation is taken as an application issue to emphasize the comparison of five specific image segmentation methods, with regard to their degrees of consistency and discriminancy. The DRIVE and STARE databases of retina images are employed and the manual/visual segmentations are used as a reference and as a control method. The so-called ϵ criterion gives results in agreement with perceptually based criterions for achieving the quantitative comparison