Restoration of Neonatal Retinal Images

Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is an eye disorder primarily affecting premature neonates. Specialists use a number of neonatal retinal images acquired by a wide field of view camera for diagnosis and the subsequent follow up. However, the premature infants’ retinal images are generally of lower visibility compared to adult retinal images, affecting the quality of diagnosis. We study some image dehazing methods from general outdoor scenes and propose an image restoration scheme for neonatal retinal images, based on the physical model of light propagation in a medium. The results from our restoration algorithm is useful for analysis by human experts as well as computer aided diagnosis and specifically we show that our method enhances vessel segmentation significantly compared to traditional methods like adaptive histogram equalization.