Super-image mosaic of infant retinal fundus: Selection and registration of the best-quality frames from videos

Wide-field retinal fundus cameras are commercially available devices that allow acquiring videos of a wide area of infants' eye, considered of clinical interest in screening for ROP (Retinopathy of Prematurity). Many frames of the video are often altered by defects such as artifacts, interlacing and defocus, which make critical and time consuming the search and choice of the good frames to be analyzed. We developed a computerized system that automatically selects the best still frames from the video and builds a mosaic from these images. It will allow clinicians to examine a single large, best quality image. The best frames are identified using several image quality parameters that measure sharpness and steadiness, and then registered to obtain a single mosaic image. A custom blending procedure is then applied in order to provide a final image with homogeneous luminosity and contrast, devoid of the dark areas typically present in the outer regions of single frames. The best-frame selection module showed a PPV of 0.92, while the visual inspection of resulting mosaics confirmed the remarkable capability of the proposed system to provide higher quality images.