Automatic Generation of Synthetic Retinal Fundus Images

Abstract

This study aims to generate synthetic and realistic retinal fundus colour images, similar in characteristics to a given dataset, as well as the values of all morphological parameters. A representative task could be, for example, the synthesis of a retinal image with the corresponding vessel tree and optic nerve head binary map, measurement of vessel width in any position, fovea localisation and so on. The presented paper describes the techniques developed for the generation of both vascular and non-vascular regions (i.e. retinal background, fovea and optic disc). To synthesise convincing retinal backgrounds and foveae, a patch-based algorithm has been developed; model-based texture synthesis techniques have also been implemented for the generation of realistic optic discs and vessel networks. The validity of our synthetic retinal images has been demonstrated by visual inspection and quantitative experiments.