Mobile screening framework of anterior segment photographed images

Abstract

This work presents a qualitative measurement of anterior segment photographed images (ASPIs) to identify between normal eyes and eyes with pterygium and pinguecula through Otsu multi-thresholding approach without contrast enhancement. In addition, we also propose a mobile screening framework of ASPIs through smartphones. ASPIs were directly sent to the cloud storage once an ASPI was captured using a smartphone camera, and then each image was processed through a digital image processing approach in a processing platform. Three important steps, namely, pre-processing, image segmentation and qualitative assessment, are involved in the processing platform of the mobile screening framework. The ASPIs are pre-processed to minimise or eliminate any unwanted areas within the image. Then, these ASPIs are segmented through multi-thresholding Otsu approach with clustering number n = 3. Segmentation result shows that the accuracy of the proposed method is 87.5%, which is comparable with the previously established work that has applied three-step differencing (3SD) method. However, the proposed approach has better computational time which is six times faster than the 3SD method. These results demonstrate a remarkable effort to produce a simple but straightforward digital image processing approach to be implemented in cloud computing for future studies.