GIMP and Wavelets for Medical Image Processing: Enhancing Images of the Fundus of the Eye
This work addresses the need for simpler image enhancement methods in medical diagnostics for eye diseases, but it is incremental as it applies existing tools to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of enhancing fundus eye images for medical diagnosis by using freely available tools like GIMP and Iris's wavelet filter, resulting in images that serve as alternatives to segmented ones without requiring complex algorithms.
The visual analysis of retina and of its vascular characteristics is important in the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases of visual perception. In the related medical diagnoses, the digital processing of the fundus images is used to obtain the segmentation of retinal vessels. However, an image segmentation is often requiring methods based on peculiar or complex algorithms: in this paper we will show some alternative approaches obtained by applying freely available tools to enhance, without a specific segmentation, the images of the fundus of the eye. We will see in particular, that combining the use of GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, with the wavelet filter of Iris, a program well-known for processing astronomical images, the result is giving images which can be alternative of those obtained from segmentation.