Fundus Image Enhancement With Pyramid Conditional Flow

Deep learning-based approaches, which learn pixel-to-pixel mapping from input to output images, have demonstrated exceptional performance in enhancing low-quality fundus images. However, due to the ambiguous definition of the ground-truth high-quality image, the pixel-to-pixel mapping encounters an ill-posed problem arising from the complex one-to-many relationship between low-quality fundus images and their corresponding high-quality versions. To address this problem, this work proposes a PCFlow, the first normalizing flow method that learns the complex distributions of high-quality fundus images rather than a pixel-to-pixel mapping. Unlike the existing image natural enhancement methods that aim to restore images with comfortable visual quality, PCFlow enhances fundus images by prioritizing clinically significant information. To this end, we design a condition module that utilizes retinal structure as a conditioning factor to constrain the optimization of PCFlow, and then build an invertible coupling layer that employs a pyramid structure for identifying each frequency component of retinal features. With the cooperation and interactions of these key components, the proposed PCFlow preserves the retinal structures and pathological characteristics essential for clinical applications. Extensive experiments on the real and synthetic fundus datasets demonstrate that our method achieves better performance.