A retinal image sharpness metric based on histogram of edge width

Abstract

Retinal image sharpness assessment is one of the critical requirements of automatic quality evaluation in telemedicine screening for diabetic retinopathy. In this paper, a new sharpness metric measuring the spread of edges is presented to quantify fundus image clarity. After edge detection on the region of interest of retinal image, the width of each edge is calculated and the histogram of region of interest generated. Based on the histogram, a distance-based factor is introduced to gain the weighted edge width, which is defined as the sharpness metric for the fundus image. The method was tested on Messidor dataset and a proprietary dataset. The results show that the proposed metric performs well over different image distortion levels and resolutions and is of low computational complexity. The weighted edge width value of gradable retinal image, which is irrelevant to resolution, is always within the range of 3–7 pixels.