Dynamic illumination based system to remove the glare and improve the quality of medical images

Medical images taken from camera based devices (e.g. laparoscope, colposcope, retinoscope, etc) are greatly affected by numerous bright reflection spots (called glare or specular reflections). This may affect the visibility of the abnormal features (if present in the glare locations). We have developed a novel solution to overcome this problem by incorporating a multi-LED lighting solution. This will intelligently and rapidly switch on and off the LED's in a pattern that dynamically and geometrically shifts/shuffles these glare spots back and forth in the image such that every glare-affected area of a single image frame can be reconstructed from a few adjacent time-frame images. We have built the prototype that successfully demonstrates how the glare problem in the medical video/image can be satisfactorily solved, significantly enhancing the accuracy of this vital procedure in the diagnosis of diseases. We achieve 65-95% reduction in specularity on phantom model using the proposed approach.