Abstract
Objective
Automated, objective and fast measurement of the image quality of single retinal fundus photos to allow a stable and reliable medical evaluation.
Methods
The proposed technique maps diagnosis-relevant criteria inspired by diagnosis procedures based on the advise of an eye expert to quantitative and objective features related to image quality. Independent from segmentation methods it combines global clustering with local sharpness and texture features for classification.
Results
On a test dataset of 301 retinal fundus images we evaluated our method on a given gold standard by human observers and compared it to a state of the art approach. An area under the ROC curve of 95.3% compared to 87.2% outperformed the state of the art approach. A significant p-value of 0.019 emphasizes the statistical difference of both approaches.
Conclusions
The combination of local and global image statistics models the defined quality criteria and automatically produces reliable and objective results in determining the image quality of retinal fundus photos.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abràmoff MD, Niemeijer M, Suttorp-Schulten MS, Viergever MA, Russell SR, van Ginneken B (2008) Evaluation of a system for automatic detection of diabetic retinopathy from color fundus photographs in a large population of patients with diabetes. Diabetes Care 31(2): 193–198
Bock R, Meier J, Nyúl LG, Hornegger J, Michelson G (2010) Glaucoma risk index: automated glaucoma detection from color fundus images. Med Image Anal 14(3): 471–481
Sinthanayothin C, Boyce JF, Williamson TH, Cook HL, Mensah E, Lal S, Usher D (2002) Automated detection of diabetic retinopathy on digital fundus images. Diabetic Med 19(2): 105–112
Abràmoff MD, Suttorp-Schulten M (2005) screening for diabetic retinopathy in a primary care population: the eye check project. Telemed e-Health 11(6): 668–674
Eskicioglu AM, Fisher PS (1995) Quality measures and their performance. IEEE Trans Commun 3(12): 2959–2965
Avcıbaş İ, Sankur B, Sayood K (2002) Statistical evaluation of image quality measures. J Electron Imaging 11(2): 206–223
Wang Z, Bovik AC, Lu L (2002) Why is image quality assessment so difficult?. IEEE Int Conf Acoust Speech Signal Process Proc 4: 3313–3316
Fleming AD, Philip S, Goatman KA, Olson JA, Sharp PF (2006) Automated assessment of diabetic retinal image quality based on clarity and field definition. Investig Ophthalmol Visual Sci 47(3): 1120–1125
Giancardo L, Abràmoff MD, Chaum E, Karnowski TP, Meriaudeau F, Tobin KW Jr (2008) Elliptical local vessel density: a fast and robust quality metric for retinal images, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2008. EMBS 2008. 30th annual international conference of the IEEE, pp 3534–3537
Lalonde M, Gagnony L, Boucher M-C (2001)Automatic visual quality assessment in optical fundus images. Proceedings of Vision Interface (VI 2001), pp 259–264
Lee SC, Wang Y (1999) Automatic retinal image quality assessment and enhancement. Proc SPIE 3661: 1581–1590
Niemeijer M, Abràmoff MD, Ginneken B (2006) Image structure clustering for image quality verification of color retina images in diabetic retinopathy screening. Med Image Anal 10(6): 888–898
van Haralick RM, Shanmugam K, Dinstein I (1973) Textural features for image classification. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern 3(6): 610–621
Chang C-C, Lin C-J (2001) “LIBSVM”: a library for support vector machines, http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Paulus, J., Meier, J., Bock, R. et al. Automated quality assessment of retinal fundus photos. Int J CARS 5, 557–564 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-010-0479-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-010-0479-7