Synthesising Wider Field Images from Narrow-Field Retinal Video Acquired Using a Low-Cost Direct Ophthalmoscope (Arclight) Attached to a Smartphone
This addresses the need for affordable retinal imaging in low- and middle-income countries to prevent blindness, representing an incremental improvement over existing low-cost devices.
The authors tackled the problem of narrow field of view and poor quality in retinal imaging from a low-cost ophthalmoscope by developing an automatic method to synthesize wider, higher-quality images from video, achieving results comparable to expensive traditional cameras.
Access to low cost retinal imaging devices in low and middle income countries is limited, compromising progress in preventing needless blindness. The Arclight is a recently developed low-cost solar powered direct ophthalmoscope which can be attached to the camera of a smartphone to acquire retinal images and video. However, the acquired data is inherently limited by the optics of direct ophthalmoscopy, resulting in a narrow field of view with associated corneal reflections, limiting its usefulness. In this work we describe the first fully automatic method utilizing videos acquired using the Arclight attached to a mobile phone camera to create wider view, higher quality still images comparable with images obtained using much more expensive and bulky dedicated traditional retinal cameras.