Textureless macula swelling detection with multiple retinal fundus images

Retinal fundus images acquired with nonmydriatic digital fundus cameras are versatile tools for the diagnosis of various retinal diseases. Because of the ease of use of newer camera models and their relatively low cost, these cameras can be employed by operators with limited training for telemedicine or point-of-care (PoC) applications. We propose a novel technique that uses uncalibrated multiple-view fundus images to analyze the swelling of the macula. This innovation enables the detection and quantitative measurement of swollen areas by remote ophthalmologists. This capability is not available with a single image and prone to error with stereo fundus cameras. We also present automatic algorithms to measure features from the reconstructed image, which are useful in PoC automated diagnosis of early macular edema, e.g., before the appearance of exudation. The technique presented is divided into three parts: first, a preprocessing technique simultaneously enhances the dark microstructures of the macula and equalizes the image; second, all available views are registered using nonmorphological sparse features; finally, a dense pyramidal optical flow is calculated for all the images and statistically combined to build a naive height map of the macula. Results are presented on three sets of synthetic images and two sets of real-world images. These preliminary tests show the ability to infer a minimum swelling of 300 µ and to correlate the reconstruction with the swollen location. © 2006 IEEE.