ENHANCEMENT OF IMAGES FOR OPHTHALMIC DISGNOSIS

摘要

The invention is a method and system for mosaicing images of a patient's (105) eye to create high resolution, wide-field ophthalmic images for the diagnosis and treatment of eye diseases. The inventive method acquires a first image of the eye (103), acquires a second image of the eye, and processes the images to produce a mosaic representation. The second image includes a portion of the first image. To guide in acquiring the second image, the method may view the first image while acquiring the second image. The images typically are acquired using either a direct opthalmoscope or a slitlamp biomicroscope. The method further may convert the images to a digital format. The step of processing includes aligning and merging the images, and conducting real-time processing and non-real-time processing. Real-time processing may include eliminating non-overlapping images, image registration, topology inference, local-to-global alignment, image fusion, signal estimation, and multiresolution blending, while the non-real-time processing may include local alignment, global alignment, intra-alignment, inter-alignment, signal averaging, and photometric blending.