Effect of Input Resolution on Retinal Vessel Segmentation Performance: An Empirical Study Across Five Datasets

TL;DR

This study examines how image resizing affects thin vessel detection in retinal segmentation, revealing that downsampling can significantly impair microvascular accuracy despite stable Dice scores.

Contribution

It introduces a width-stratified sensitivity metric and provides empirical insights into the impact of resolution changes across diverse datasets.

Findings

Thin vessel sensitivity improves with downsampling in high-resolution datasets.

Native resolution yields the best thin vessel detection in low-to-mid resolution datasets.

Aggressive downsampling reduces thin vessel sensitivity by up to 15.8 percentage points.

Abstract

Most deep learning pipelines for retinal vessel segmentation resize fundus images to satisfy GPU memory constraints and enable uniform batch processing. However, the impact of this resizing on thin vessel detection remains underexplored. When high resolution images are downsampled, thin vessels are reduced to subpixel structures, causing irreversible information loss even before the data enters the network. Standard volumetric metrics such as the Dice score do not capture this loss because thick vessel pixels dominate the evaluation. We investigated this effect by training a baseline UNet at multiple downsampling ratios across five fundus datasets (DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1, HRF, and FIVES) with native widths ranging from 565 to 3504 pixels, keeping all other settings fixed. We introduce a width-stratified sensitivity metric that evaluates thin (half-width <3 pixels), medium (3 to 7 pixels), and thick (>7 pixels) vessel detection separately, using native resolution width estimates derived from a Euclidean distance transform. Results show that for high-resolution datasets (HRF, FIVES), thin vessel sensitivity improves monotonically as images are downsampled toward the encoder's effective operating range, peaking at processed widths between 256 and 876 pixels. For low-to-mid resolution datasets (DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1), thin vessel sensitivity is highest at or near native resolution and degrades with any downsampling. Across all five datasets, aggressive downsampling reduced thin vessel sensitivity by up to 15.8 percentage points (DRIVE) while Dice remained relatively stable, confirming that Dice alone is insufficient for evaluating microvascular segmentation.