Computer Vision News - December 2016

Every month, Computer Vision News reviews a successful project. Our main purpose is to show how diverse image processing applications can be and how the different techniques can help to solve technical challenges and physical difficulties. This month we review software for montage of retinal images , developed for a client by RSIP Vision engineers . Do you have a project in computer vision and image processing? Contact our consultants . This article relates a very particular project in the field of ophthalmology : it implies stitching of fundus (retina) images . Image stitching is a very well- known process with many classical applications in computer vision. The most popular one is panorama: after taking images in some sequence, software will arrange them together stitching all images into a full panorama of the whole landscape. Another application involves surveillance, when you stitch together images or other data coming from different cameras with specific fields of view in order to have a broader vision of the area . In eye health, stitching retina images is very important: the retina is observed though the pupil of the eye, therefore the field of view is very limited. Even though ophthalmologists often use dilation agents to enlarge the size of the pupils, it is still not enough to provide the whole information about the retina. The common procedure is to ask the patient to look in all four directions, one after the other: this enables to scan the retina from all different angles, so that it is fully included in the images. The purpose is to use the digital images just captured and stitch them together in order to obtain a full panorama of the retina : this will enable to study the blood flow in it, understand the status of the vessels and find eventual leaks or other pathologies . Images of the eye are not taken with only one device: they might come from regular cameras, fluorescein (which emphasizes blood vessels), Fundus AutoFluorescence (FAF), IndoCyanine Green (ICG) contrast agent and even Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) . All these modalities offer only a limited field of view per every image, hence the need to stitch them one to another if we want to see the retina as a whole . Project 26 Computer Vision News Project Montage of Retinal Images Stitch them one to another to see the retina as a whole