Detection and registration of vessels for longitudinal 3D retinal OCT images using SURF

The recent introduction of next generation spectral optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become increasingly important in the detection and investigation of retinal related diseases. However, unstable eye position of patient makes tracking disease progression over short period difficult. This paper proposed a method to remove the eye position difference for longitudinal retinal OCT data. In the proposed method, pre-processing is first applied to get the projection image. Then, a vessel enhancement filter is applied to detect vessel shadows. Third, SURF algorithm is used to extract the feature points and RANSAC algorithm is used to remove outliers. Finally, transform parameter is estimated and the longitudinal OCT data are registered. Simulation results show that our proposed method is accurate.