Automatic no-reference quality assessment for retinal fundus images using vessel segmentation

Abstract

Fundus imaging is the most commonly used modality to collect information about the human eye background. Objective and quantitative assessment of quality for the acquired images is essential for manual, computer-aided and fully automatic diagnosis. In this paper, we present a no-reference quality metric to quantify image noise and blur and its application to fundus image quality assessment. The proposed metric takes the vessel tree visible on the retina as guidance to determine an image quality score. In our experiments, the performance of this approach is demonstrated by correlation analysis with the established full-reference metrics peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM). We found a Spearman rank correlation for PSNR and SSIM of 0.89 and 0.91. For real data, our metric correlates reasonable to a human observer, indicating high agreement to human visual perception.