Single-shot retinal image enhancement using untrained and pretrained neural networks priors integrated with analytical image priors

Retinal images acquired using fundus cameras are often visually blurred due to imperfect imaging conditions, refractive medium turbidity, and motion blur. In addition, ocular diseases such as the presence of cataracts also result in blurred retinal images. The presence of blur in retinal fundus images reduces the effectiveness of the diagnosis process of an expert ophthalmologist or a computer-aided detection/diagnosis system. In this paper, we put forward a single-shot deep image prior (DIP)-based approach for retinal image enhancement. Unlike typical deep learning-based approaches, our method does not require any training data. Instead, our DIP-based method can learn the underlying image prior while using a single degraded image. To perform retinal image enhancement, we frame it as a layer decomposition problem and investigate the use of two well-known analytical priors, i.e., dark channel prior (DCP) and bright channel prior (BCP) for atmospheric light estimation. We show that both the untrained neural networks and the pretrained neural networks can be used to generate an enhanced image while using only a single degraded image. The proposed approach is time and memory -efficient, which makes the solution feasible for real-world resource-constrained environments. We evaluate our proposed framework quantitatively on five datasets using three widely used metrics and complement that with a subjective qualitative assessment of the enhancement by two expert ophthalmologists. For instance, our method has achieved significant performance for untrained CDIPs coupled with DCP in terms of average PSNR, SSIM, and BRISQUE values of 40.41, 0.97, and 34.2, respectively, and for untrained CDIPs coupled with BCP, it achieved average PSNR, SSIM, and BRISQUE values of 40.22, 0.98, and 36.38, respectively. Our extensive experimental comparison with several competitive baselines on public and non-public proprietary datasets validates the proposed ideas and framework.