Registration of OCT fundus images with color fundus photographs based on blood vessel ridges

This paper proposes an algorithm to register OCT fundus images (OFIs) with color fundus photographs (CFPs). This makes it possible to correlate retinal features across the different imaging modalities. Blood vessel ridges are taken as features for registration. A specially defined distance, incorporating information of normal direction of blood vessel ridge pixels, is designed to calculate the distance between each pair of pixels to be matched in the pair image. Based on this distance a similarity function between the pair image is defined. Brute force search is used for a coarse registration and then an Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm for a more accurate registration. The registration algorithm was tested on a sample set containing images of both normal eyes and eyes with pathologies. Three transformation models (similarity, affine and quadratic models) were tested on all image pairs respectively. The experimental results showed that the registration algorithm worked well. The average root mean square errors for the affine model are 31 μm (normal) and 59 μm (eyes with disease). The proposed algorithm can be easily adapted to registration for other modality retinal images.