Robust Detection Model of Vascular Landmarks for Retinal Image Registration: A Two-Stage Convolutional Neural Network

Registration is useful for image processing in computer vision. It can be applied to retinal images and provide support for ophthalmologists in tracking disease progression and monitoring therapeutic responses. This study proposed a robust detection model of vascular landmarks to improve the performance of retinal image registration. The proposed model consists of a two-stage convolutional neural network, in which one segments the retinal vessels on a pair of images, and the other detects junction points from the vessel segmentation image. Information obtained from the model was utilized for the registration. The keypoints were extracted based on the acquired vascular landmark points, and the orientation features were calculated as descriptors. Then, the reference and sensed images were registered by matching keypoints using a homography matrix and random sample consensus algorithm. The proposed method was evaluated on five databases and seven evaluation metrics to verify both clinical effectiveness and robustness. The results established that the proposed method showed outstanding performance for registration compared with other state-of-the-art methods. In particular, the high and significantly improved registration results were identified on FIRE database with area under the curve (AUC) of 0.988, 0.511, and 0.803 in S, P, and A classes. Furthermore, the proposed method worked well on poor quality and multimodal datasets demonstrating an ability to achieve high AUC above 0.8.