A Comparative Study of Different Illumination Correction

Techniques Using Colour Fundus Images: A Review for Early

Detection of Diabetic Eye Diseases.

M. Mishra, Manish Sharma, Shreyasee Debnath, T. Esther Lotha and Benjungkumla

Department of ECE
North Eastern Regional Institute of Science and Technology
25th Nov 2012
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 Overview:
• Introduction

• Work Done
- Different techniques of illumination correction .

• Conclusion

• References

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 Introduction
Fundus Image:

• Image obtained from the back side of the eye.

• Ocular fundus and ocular media.

• Ocular fundus consists of

Retina, Optic Disk, Cup,
Macula, Fovea and
Blood vessels

Figure : Normal fundus image (Ref: www.optic-disk.org)

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 Diabetic Retinopathy
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR).

Classes of DR - Nonproliferative mild,

moderate, severe and proliferative .

Other retinal disease caused by Diabetes-

Glaucoma.

Figure : Diabetic fundus image (Ref: www.optic-disk.org)

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 The effect of diabetic eye diseases on vision

Figure : Influence of diabetes on vision: (a) normal vision, (b) glaucoma, (c) diabetic
retinopathy; (Courtesy: National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health [21]).

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Why Analysis of Fundus Images of Retina is Required?

1. Analysis of retinal pathological lesions [Reza et al., 2007]

- Early stage or non proliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR)

- Progressive or proliferative retinopathy (PR)

2. Study of vessel abnormalities [Rangayyan et al., 2009]

3. Identification of retinal pigments (Such as: Hemoglobin and Melanin.)

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 Review: Methods of Analysis

1. Detection of edges by Sobel operators [Rangayyan et al., 2009]

2. Hough transform for detection of optic disk [Rangayyan et al., 2009]

3. Mathematical morphology [Mendonca et al., 2006]

4. Detection of vessels by modified matched filters [Zhang et al.,2009]

5. Effects of pre-processing eye fundus images on appearance based

glaucoma classification [ Meier et al., 2007]

6. Region filling and object removal by image inpainting [Criminisi et al., 2004]

7. Snakes: Active contour models [Kass et al., 1988] 7

Literature Review
8. Chan Active contours without edges [Chan et al., 2001]

9. Color image segmentation by grouping of pixels [Banerjee et al., 2001]

10. PCA of fundus images [Jorg Meier., 2010]

11. Textural features for image classification [Haralic et al., 1973]

12. Eigenfaces for recognition [M. Turk et al., 1991]

13. Haralick's texture features computed for biological applications

[Gipp et al., 2009]
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 Problem Definition

To develop an efficient framework for early detection of

Glaucoma and Diabetic Retinopathy using color fundus images.

Motivations:

1. Glaucoma and Diabetic Retinopathy – the leading cause of

blindness.

2. Timely detection and treatment for DR prevents severe visual loss

in more than 50% of the patients.

3. Shortage of ophthalmologists and the continuous increase of the

diabetic population.

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 Glaucoma Characteristics
• Thinning of neuroretinal rim

• Increase in Cup to Disc Ratio (CDR).

• Retina and vessels are normal.

Diffuse RNFL loss
Normal RNFL (advanced glaucoma)

Figure: Diffuse RNFL (Retinal nerve fiber layer) Loss, (Ref: www.opticdisk.org) 10
 Glaucoma classification, based on CDR

Glaucoma Risk Index calculation consists of three steps:

(i) Preprocessing
(ii) Segmentation
(iii) Classification

Figure: Processing pipeline for detection of glaucoma

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 Illumination Correction

• Illumination field inhomogeneity strongly affects the visual appearance of

an image[5].

• Several factors leading to non-uniform illumination :

(i) The curved surface of the retina
(ii) Pupil dilation (highly variable among patients)
(iii) Different visual angle of the patients during image acquisition

• The interferences (not originated by glaucoma) affects the illumination of

the ONH and have an influence to the subsequent statistical analysis.
 Illumination Correction
• Illumination correction requires:
(i) Homogeneous lightning of the Optical Nerve Head (ONH)
(ii) Similar illumination level among all images of the sample set.

Principle of Illumination Correction :

- Achieved by global correction techniques applying a background correction.

- These methods subtract the estimated retinal background from the original
image to gain a homogeneously illuminated fundus image.

- The estimation of a background can be done by average intensity filtering

within a large neighborhood.
Illumination correction using morphological operations
• Morphological opening to estimate the background

• Illumination corrected image = Original image - Estimated

background image

Results:

(I) Original fundus image (ii) Image in Green (iii) Estimated Background (iv) Image obtained by (v) Illumination corrected
channel image subtracting (iii) from (ii) image

Figure: Results of various intermediate steps for illumination correction

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 Homomorphic Filters
• Homomorphic filters have been used in signal processing methods since the
1970s.

• A Homomorphic filter is a system which accepts a signal composed of two

components and returns the signal with one of the components removed.

• Separates illumination & reflectance by processing the natural logarithm of the

image in the frequency domain.

• Illumination mainly contributes to low frequency components (slow changes).

• Reflectance mainly contribute to high frequency components (rapid changes).

• The components are separated by a filter in the frequency domain and

processed individually.
Illumination correction using Homomorphic Filtering
The image formation model using illumination and reflectance is given by

f (x, y) i(x, y). r(x, y)

i ( x, y ) Illumination r( x, y) Reflectance

Results:

Original fundus image Gray image Illumination corrected image

Figure: Various steps of illumination correction using homomorphic filtering

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 Illumination correction using Median Filtering
• Median filter having large kernel for background estimation.

• Ratio of original image pixels to the estimated background

values gives illumination corrected image.

Results:

(i) Original fundus (ii) Gray image (iii) Estimated background (v) Illumination corrected
image image image

Figure : Results of various intermediate steps for illumination correction

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 Conclusion:

• The results of three different techniques namely morphological, homomorphic

and median filtering were presented for illumination correction.

• Median filtering shows a better results compared to other two techniques for a
given set of images.

• However, morphological operations provides the advantage of direct

geometric interpretation and simplicity.

• Homomorphic filtering approach is quite different from the other two

methods in sense that it is a frequency domain filtering process which
compresses the brightness, from the lighting condition while enhancing the
contrast from the reflectance properties of the image.
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Thank you

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