Enhancement of Retinal Fundus Images via Pixel Color Amplification
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing retinal images for better segmentation in medical imaging, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing dehazing priors and methods.
The authors tackled the problem of improving segmentation performance on retinal fundus images by proposing a pixel color amplification theory and enhancement methods, resulting in Dice score increases of up to 0.491 over a baseline without enhancement.
We propose a pixel color amplification theory and family of enhancement methods to facilitate segmentation tasks on retinal images. Our novel re-interpretation of the image distortion model underlying dehazing theory shows how three existing priors commonly used by the dehazing community and a novel fourth prior are related. We utilize the theory to develop a family of enhancement methods for retinal images, including novel methods for whole image brightening and darkening. We show a novel derivation of the Unsharp Masking algorithm. We evaluate the enhancement methods as a pre-processing step to a challenging multi-task segmentation problem and show large increases in performance on all tasks, with Dice score increases over a no-enhancement baseline by as much as 0.491. We provide evidence that our enhancement preprocessing is useful for unbalanced and difficult data. We show that the enhancements can perform class balancing by composing them together.